Rachel Podger

Compilations are highly useful in understanding the works of the inexhaustibly tuneful British composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695). He had a few big hits, like the Funeral Music for Queen Mary (which is included here) and the opera Dido and Aeneas (which isn't). But much of his best music is scattered around in small bits, residing within genres that are rather odd from today's perspective. Purcell spent much of his short adult life as a theater composer, and his incidental music, for example, is filled with perfect miniatures…

Gary Cooper is a multi-talented musician, equally adept at both harpsichord and fortepiano performance, as well as conducting. His keyboard performances follow strict historic practices and while he is identified with Baroque music, particularly the works of J.S. Bach, Cooper is also known for his incisive Beethoven interpretations.

The "choice collection" of "music of Purcell's London" is of items such as might have been heard at the concerts of then contemporary music held on the premises of Thomas Britton, the "small coalman", surely one of the most 'unlikely' patrons in the history of music. It is in effect complimentary to the Palladian Ensemble's earlier disc (An Excess of Pleasure, also on Linn records), with another liberal helping of Matteis's various and sometimes agreeably bizarre Ayres and two more of Locke's Broken Consorts, which we find absorbing rather than confusing - as Charles II did…