Once The New Gustav Leonhardt Edition departs from German-speaking composers, the pickings get relatively slim. Five CDs and three tracks from a CD of “Songs of the Baroque Era” account for English composers. Three of those CDs, along with those three tracks, are devoted to Henry Purcell. The other two identify themselves as “English Consort & Keyboard Music.”
from the Amazon.com Web page for the album of Purcell odes
The Purcell offerings are described as anthems, instrumental music, and songs. The closest one gets to a systematic collection is the CD of the three odes that Purcell composed for birthday celebrations for Queen Mary. The best known of these is Come Ye Sons of Art. On the CD it is preceded by Now Does the Glorious Day Appear and Love’s Goddess Sure.
Once again, the listener is deprived of useful booklet content, both librettos and background text. The good news is that the vocalists are all comfortable with the English language, and deliver their words with more than satisfactory clarity. Those performers are soprano Julia Gooding, countertenors James Bowman and Christopher Robson, tenor Howard Crook, and basses David Wilson-Johnson and Michael George. The ensemble consists of the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and choral diction does not consistently rise to that satisfactory level.
It is unclear whether those two remaining albums originally included program notes about why the individual selections were chosen and how, if at all, the contributing composers related to each other. My guess is that at least a few of the names will be unfamiliar to most listeners. My conclusion is that those interested in British music from the seventeenth century should be able to find more informative sources with performers as satisfying as those that Leonhardt recruited.
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