Of the many new recordings of sundry songs to have appeared in Purcell festivities of recent months, this has the hallmarks of one likely to run as a thoroughbred in comparative surveys of the future. As we have come to expect with Tragicomedia, the programme is carefully considered, well balanced and colourfully presented. Unlike the group's last and somewhat disappointing release of Anna Magdalena Bach's Notebook (Teldec, 12/94), these Welcome Songs and Odes have a dramatic bite and emotional range (despite the poor-quality verse) which directors Stephen Stubbs and Erin Headley can nurture over comparatively longer periods; this is one of the reasons why they succeeded in their Monteverdi disc of Il Combattimento (10/93) where others are often found wanting. The music chosen here is all out of Purcell's top drawer, with Tragicomedia combining works with ravishing string ritornellos and extrovert paeans to the King, such as the gloriously crystalline and breezy Welcome, viceregent, with the more intimate elegies on the death of Queen Mary which have the capacity to melt marble. The ensemble in the larger works is always fresh and immediate and how Tragicomedia relish the rich glowing textures of this first Welcome Song. The solo singing of Suzette Leblanc and Barbara Borden is particularly striking: bright though never uniformly, they produce a glistening yet suitably threnodizing reading of the deliciously poignant O dive custos. Douglas Nasrawi is a naturally dramatic and effective singer though apart from favouring a soprano in Incassum, Lesbia, his tone is rather wearingly projected.
The most significant work to be included is the unjustly little-known but outstanding Ode, Why, why are all the Muses mute?. This was the first Welcome Ode which Purcell composed for King James II in 1685. The usual array of solos, duets, choruses and so on is framed by an unusually rhetorical opening in a declamatory quasi-recitative where the musicians have to be awakened from their slumber and, at the close, by a harmonically devastating (and emotionally draining) setting of the words, ''His fame shall endure till all things decay, His fame and the world together shall die, Shall vanish together away''. In between, we are blessed with one of Purcell's most affecting ground bass arias, ''Britain, thou now art great'', which is sung acceptably by Steve Dugardin, though there is really no touching James Bowman on Hyperion in this song as the latter curls himself with such effortless nobility around the seamless melodic strand. Elsewhere, Tragicomedia provide an altogether different approach to Robert King, a tighter, more shapely consort with an attractive vibrancy and immediacy throughout. I was less enchanted by their handling of the magical close to the piece, where King's by no means perfect but none the less shimmering treatment of those simple words leaves one rather more affected. Yet this is still a fine performance, committed and imaginative and with the other gems here, a must for those who want a richly endowed demonstration of Purcell at his most potent. The recorded sound is spacious, the tracking in the last ode non-existent: it may force me to listen all the way through but there are movements I like to hear more regularly than others. Is that really such a solecism?R1 '9507125'