Purcell - Tyrannic Love

Louis-Noel Bestion de Camboulas, Eugenie Lefebvre (soprano), Etienne Bazola (baritone), Ensemble Les Surprises

Here’s a timely reminder that, even in the seemingly bleakest times, there’s always hope. ‘Tyrannic Love’, the new disc on Alpha from Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas and his Ensemble Les Surprises, gathers together music by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries from the extraordinary explosion of artistic activity that followed periods of civil strife (the Civil War and Cromwellian Commonwealth), natural and man-made disasters (the Great Plague and Great Fire of London). When the monarchy was restored and Charles II returned from French exile in 1660, he brought with him ambitions to emulate the cultural glories of the French court, as well as musicians who could help achieve those ends. So it’s entirely appropriate that Bestion de Camboulas and his group, together with soprano Eugénie Lefebvre and baritone Étienne Bazola should bring more than a touch of Gallic flair to music by Purcell, John Blow, John Eccles and Jeremiah Clarke, in a fabulously varied programme of mainly theatrical music from the last decades of the 17th century.

It wasn’t until 1690, following the accession of the new monarchs William III and Mary, that a reduction of musical activities at court allowed Purcell, in the last years of his short life, to throw himself into music for the stage – both spoken plays and more operatic fare. This disc has a generous selection from both, encompassing the well-known (King Arthur, The Fairy Queen)  as well as relative rarities (Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, A Fool’s Preferment and The Virtuous Wife). The overriding theme, as suggested by the disc’s title, is Love in all its guises: tragic and intense, gentle and mischievous, or even comic and satirical. Underpinning it all is the splendidly animated and responsive instrumental playing of Les Surprises themselves. Whether a full complement of strings and wind (all one instrument per part) or in more intimate configurations, they bring utter commitment to their music-making. Just try the opening, toe-tapping Hornpipe from King Arthur (complete with jaunty percussion and thrumming guitar continuo), or the Hornpipe and two Dances from The Fairy Queen (the recorders and organ sounding delightfully ‘woody’ in the Dance of the Fairies). Then there’s the wonderfully atmospheric Dance of the Furies, with its slow, searching opening, followed by the rushing scales associated with these mythical beings in French opera, and the tender ‘Saraband for the Graces’ from Blow’s Venus and Adonis.

In the vocal numbers, Lefebvre and Bazola are excellent, with thoroughly idiomatic diction, pitch-perfect, but also reaching far beyond the notes. Listen to the ‘mad’ aria ‘I burn, my brain consumes to ashes’ from Eccles’s music for Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote, where Lefebvre gives a masterclass in singing-acting, or the immensely affecting ‘Poor Celadon’ by John Blow, in which Bazola’s voice seems to emerge from nothing in sympathy with the fate of the lovelorn shepherd. There are nice comedic turns, too, as in ‘There’s not a swain on the plain’ from Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, with its highly effective use of rubato, dovetailing seamlessly into the Fairy Queen Hornpipe from which it was adapted, or the comic mad song ‘There’s nothing so fatal as woman’ from A Fool’s Preferment. More enjoyable still is the conjuring scene from The Indian Queen, the arias for Ismeron and the God of Dreams separated by an instrumental Sinfonia for oboes and bassoon, a marvellously involving extract that leaves the listener wanting more.

The Dirge ‘Sleep, poor youth’ from Eccles’s Don Quixote music is a duet that deserves to be more widely known, and in the latter part of the disc a number of non-stage pieces make welcome appearances. You may wonder whether ‘So when the glitt’ring Queen of Night’ from The Yorkshire Feast Song got much of a hearing from a gathering of Yorkshiremen in London, though Lefebvre’s rapt singing is enough to melt even the most hardened of temperaments. An instrumental Ground in D minor is taken from Clarke’s Song on the Assumption (c.1695), his first important work. It is followed by a return to the stage with the enchanting duet ‘My dearest, my fairest’ by Daniel Purcell, and another ‘conjuring’ number, the duet ‘Hark! my Damilcar’, from Henry’s music for Dryden’s Tyrannic Love. The disc is rounded off with the exultant instrumental Chaconne from King Arthur, a suitably uplifting close to a tremendously spirited and expertly recorded album.