Purcell: Music for Pleasure and Devotion – Parrott

Somebody at Virgin — or was it EMI by the time this reissue surfaced — had the sensible idea of raiding the Andrew Parrott vaults and assembling a kind of Purcell sampler, and the results, cobbled together though they are from sessions scattered across who knows how many years, hang together with startling coherence. That in itself tells you something about Parrott’s Purcell style, which by now is so settled, so thoroughly considered, that you could drop in excerpts recorded a decade apart and scarcely notice the seam.

Purcell repays this kind of promiscuous programming better than almost any other composer I can think of. He wrote for the theater, for the church, for private domestic music-making, for state occasions — and did not appear to distinguish among these obligations in terms of care or invention. The trumpet overture that opens The Indian Queen struts in with real swagger, the Taverner Players’ brass bright but not blaring, and by the time we reach the “Rondeau” from Abdelazar — yes, the one Britten filched for the Young Person’s Guide — you’re reminded how much personality Purcell could pack into ninety seconds. There’s an odd melancholy undertow in that tune even at speed, a minor-key shadow that Britten understood perfectly and that Parrott doesn’t oversell here. Wise of him.

The vocal soloists are drawn from that first great generation of English early-music specialists — Emily Van Evera, John Mark Ainsley in particularly fine, forward voice, Simon Grant and Jeremy White down in the bass register where Purcell so loved to send his tone painting on “the secrets of our heart.” The Funeral Sentences are the emotional core of this disc, and rightly so. Composed — or compiled, since scholars still argue over how much is original to the queen’s funeral and how much recycled from earlier sentences — for Mary II’s obsequies in 1695, they carry a chromatic weight that still stops the breath. “Man that is born of a woman” opens plainly enough, almost like a hymn, before Purcell’s harmonic imagination starts pulling at the seams; “Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our heart” is desolate in a way English church music rarely allows itself to be. Parrott’s choir sings with the vibrato-light, words-first clarity that was his trademark long before it became fashionable, and the blend is beautifully judged — you hear individual voices without ever losing the sense of ensemble.

Elsewhere the disc wanders profitably into chamber territory. The Three Parts upon a Ground is a lovely, slightly obsessive piece — three violins spinning increasingly intricate lines over an unyielding bass that never once varies, a compositional straitjacket Purcell seems almost gleeful about wearing. John Toll’s harpsichord solo, the Ground in Gamut, is stern stuff, more Bach-adjacent than most English keyboard music of the period, and Robert Woolley’s account of the Voluntary in d minor has an improvisatory freedom that never curdles into fussiness. The Fantazia a 4 reminds us that Purcell was, astonishingly, the last major composer to write for consort of viols — an antique genre by the 1680s, already sounding backward-looking even to contemporaries, yet he treats it with a contrapuntal sophistication that makes you wonder what he might have done with the string quartet had he lived past thirty-six.

Is there filler? A little. The catch “Of all the instruments that are” is a curiosity rather than a masterpiece — bawdy, brief, probably more fun to sing than to hear once removed from a tavern context — but its inclusion is generous rather than padded, evidence of a compiler who wanted breadth over easy applause.

The disc closes with the Masque of the Four Seasons from The Fairy Queen, and here Parrott’s theatrical instincts pay full dividends: winter’s shivering strings, the pastoral warmth of the summer music, all handled with a lightness that never trivializes. Compare this with the old Britten/English Chamber Orchestra Fairy Queen — lush, romanticized, wonderful in its way — and you hear immediately how far the historically informed movement had traveled by the time Parrott made these recordings, and how much clarity was gained without sacrificing warmth.

If the packaging is stingy with album dates and venues, so be it. The performances speak plainly enough for themselves. This is Purcell as he should sound: alert, various, occasionally strange, never merely pretty. A fine single-disc introduction — and for those who already know their Purcell, a satisfying reminder of why Parrott’s way with this composer has aged so well.