Period Performances Bring Purcell to the Forefront

Call it period performance or historically informed performance: The practice of playing music of earlier times on contemporaneous instruments--and in accordance with what we presume to have been the prevalent performing styles of the time--is now widespread.

Whatever we call it, never call it authentic performance; this implies having privileged access to, and communication with, the dead.

By any name, the deluge of music played in antiquarian styles continues, with increasingly frequent live encounters in the concert hall and something approaching overkill on recordings.

The chronological limits are being pushed forward too, lately all the way to middle-period Brahms. But the Baroque and Classical eras remain the preferred territory, with some important composers who had become somewhat neglected before this new wave of scholarship now coming into their own, among them a current darling, Henry Purcell.

Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” is not a coherent stage work but a vast musical interlude created for a bowdlerized 1692 production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

This glorious collection of songs, dances, choruses and instrumental pieces is pleasingly presented by a choral-instrumental ensemble mysteriously called the Sixteen, vigorously conducted by Harry Christophers and with such stylistic paragons as sopranos Lorna Anderson and Ann Murray (the latter making a successful transition from mezzo), male alto Michael Chance, tenor John Mark Ainsley and bass Michael George among the soloists (Collins Classics 701320, two CDs).

The performance is intimate and appealing, with a touch of becoming roughness and without the fussy embellishment and occasional dramatic excesses, as well as some of its singers’ uncertain English, that mar William Christie’s widely praised, grander interpretation on the Harmonia Mundi label.

That Purcell isn’t the exclusive property of the British is illustrated by an attractive collection of instrumental suites from his stage works, including “Dido and Aeneas” and “King Arthur,” from the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock. The German-based ensemble--the makeup of European period orchestras is inevitably multinational--balances keen-edge rhythmicality with the sort of long-lined lyricism once considered alien to period practice (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi/BMG 77231).

A leading light among American period specialists is Julianne Baird, whose superb projection of texts coupled to a finely tuned, rounded--that is, unchirpy--soprano distinguishes a collection titled “English Mad Songs and Ayres” (Dorian 901050).

Baird, with the sympathetic assistance of harpsichordist Colin Tilney and gambist Alison Mackay, brings tremendous dramatic point to Purcell’s variously hilarious and frightening “Bess of Bedlam” while flawlessly negotiating the melancholy lyric phrases and tricky pitches of the same composer’s “Evening Hymn” and “Music for a While” and Thomas Arne’s “Sleep Gentle Cherub.” An altogether beguiling program.

Moving ahead in time, consider what may be the ultimate, inadvertent caricature of period performance and of Vivaldi: that maligned composer’s Opus 10 recorder concertos from an Italian ensemble called Il Giardino Armonico (Teldec 73267).

The group’s style is predicated on a gut-string edginess of tone so extreme as to suggest unspeakable things being done to small animals, blinding speed, explosive attacks and breathless, hacked-out phrasing. Il Giardino Armonico’s Vivaldi belongs in the so-awful-it’s-wonderful category. A party record for musical sophisticates.

Further ahead chronologically and totally removed from the interpretive twilight zone are the Schubert Fifth and Sixth symphonies in agile performances by New York’s Classical Band under Bruno Weil, music director-designate of the Carmel Bach Festival, who is scheduled to appear with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra at Hollywood Bowl this summer (Sony 46697).

Weil and the New Yorkers’ lithely handsome readings outpoint the period competition from Roy Goodman and the Hanover Band, lively but scrappily executed, and in the blithe Fifth Symphony, Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players, who remain rigidly earthbound.