Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Hail! Bright Cecilia (1692)
John Blow (1649-1708)
Welcome Every Guest (1695-1700)
Charlotte La Thrope (soprano), Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian (countertenor), Hugo Hymas (tenor), Tomáš Král (baritone), Vlad Crosman (baritone)
Le Poème Harmonique/Vincent Dumestre
rec. 2024, La Chapelle Royale du Château de Versailles
English texts with French translations included
Château de Versailles CVS151 [62]
Both these works share a St. Cecilia’s Day theme though John Blow’s short Welcome Every Guest is much more obscure than Purcell’s better-known work and even its exact date of composition, between 1695 and 1700, is unknown. It’s a big, bold work for four-part chorus, four-part strings, trumpets, flutes and continuo instruments and though it only lasts about ten minutes, it makes a strong impression. It seems, though, never before to have been recorded in full. The opening Symphony is well sprung rhythmically and the final panel, a ground bass over which the baritone Tomáš Král sings a virtuoso aria invoking the Muses, is laced with octave leaps and decorations. The original singer seems to have been a bass but the baritone is preferred in this recording. The range of the continuo instruments is florid, but the original instrument band Le Poème Harmonique under Vincent Dumestre is practised in its native French repertory so one shouldn’t necessarily cavil, and it does show coloristic imagination, but it did set my critical alarm bells ringing.
The bells only deepened in Purcell’s Hail! Bright Cecilia. One notices here the big echo in La Chapelle Royale at the end of each number but of more concern to me is both the conception and the detailing of this performance. The choral forces are well scaled to the orchestral ones – twenty singers to twenty (or so) instrumentalists – though the chorus can be a little distant in the balance. More problematically, Dumestre encourages them to engage in a swelling effect in the opening Chorus which sounds exceptionally mannered and unattractive. Hark! Each Tree is over-embellished and metrically unsteady, with point-making slowings down. Countertenor Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian is pallid and uninteresting here, as he is in The airy Violin, though better elsewhere. Hugo Hymas sings ‘Tis Nature’s Voice with a bark in his divisions and a tightly hardening tone and is accompanied by an ear-distracting continuo contingent. The chorus Soul of the World! is too fast and unyielding, impelled by a breathless conception and leaving the fine soprano Charlotte La Thrope at the mercy of faulty direction. As for the other singers, Král has an intrinsically good voice but here he is neither as steady nor as rich-voiced as bass Michael Rippon in Charles Mackerras’ old 1969 recording.
I’m afraid I have very little else to say and none of it good. The continuo instruments again draw attention to themselves, and not to the music itself, in Thou tun’st this World and again, more damagingly, in Wondrous Machine! The tempo here is fine but the bassoon and oboe are both too loud and unsubtle and the solo singing is full of scooped effects. Incidentally Andrew Parrott appends an organ solo linking passage here. David Thomas for John Eliot Gardiner shows how this should go and Gardiner’s continuo players are properly scaled and musical, as are Parrott’s team.
A court ode such as this, which marries grandiose theatre with intimate chamber music, that floods the score with a rich variety of solos, duets and choruses and that utilises the latest style in Italian da capo form deserves the very best in conception and execution. I don’t know what Dumestre’s point is, other than to Frenchify the work – when he should surely, if anything, be stressing its Italianate nature – but there are far too many things wrong with this recording to take it seriously as a recommendable version.
I have a strong hankering for the Mackerras – though the first ever recording was directed by Michael Tippett with Alfred Deller prominent in the vocal team – which is thoughtful, well-scaled, unostentatious and suitably grand but I suppose a more contemporary recommendation would be Gardiner in 1982 or Parrott. Robert King is efficient but oddly faceless here and Herreweghe and Minkowski lack the kind of thoughtfulness – as well as surprises – that Parrott and Gardiner reveal.
The Château de Versailles booklet is excellent, as is the presentation. They’re both far better than the performance.
Jonathan Woolf
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