Variations on Themes by Purcell

Henry Purcell--”the matchless man, alas too soon retir’d,” to quote from the funeral ode by his friend John Dryden--lived only to the age of 35, from 1659 to 1695. He had 15 productive years as a composer when an unspecified illness ended his life at the peak of his fame.

The importance and originality of what Purcell composed in those years was brought home spectacularly by the recording industry during his just-concluded tricentennial year. It began and ended with productions of “The Fairy Queen,” a grand operatic diversion loosely based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

First came a fine edition from EMI (55234, two CDs) with the marvelous Lorraine Hunt at its vocal center. Hunt ascends with ease to the soprano heights from the mezzo territory she usually inhabits, and she is seconded by the excellent Schtz ChoirCQ? and the London Classical Players, both founded by Roger Norrington, who conducts here with a deft, affectionate hand.

The year-end “Fairy Queen” (Teldec 97684, two CDs) came from Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a most controversial conductor, especially when he has one of the core Baroque works by the throat. One’s worst expectations are fulfilled in this performance. Every phrase bears the imprint of Harnoncourt’s arrogance, reducing soloists, choristers and instrumentalists to puppets, trapped into conveying Harnoncourt’s dubious messages rather than speaking for the composer.

A recurrent problem is Harnoncourt’s refusal to take even the most basic cues for the presentation of the music from the text (attributed to the actor-manager Thomas Betterton). Note, for example, the aria for soprano and chorus, “Sing while we trip it,” which should, well, trip. Harnoncourt leads it as a dirge--only one of a dozen instances of making nonsense of both words and music.

Under the circumstances one sympathizes with the singers, including the otherwise irreproachable Barbara Bonney and Michael Chance, while pondering the grotesque balances (the thunderous basso continuo often swamps the melodic line) demanded by Harnoncourt of his orchestra, the Vienna Concentus Musicus.

The most frequently performed of Purcell’s works is the one-act opera “Dido Aeneas” (circa 1685), a marvel of eloquence and dramatic condensation. The 50-minute score received at least a half-dozen new recorded interpretations in 1995, with two of particular note. The Erato release (98477), in which William Christie directs from the harpsichord his Paris-based Arts Florissants ensemble, is a ravishing success, musically and dramatically. Vronique GensCQ? is a Dido of splendid vocal command and touching vulnerability, and Nathan Berg delivers a powerfully sung, subtly deceitful Aeneas.

The “Dido and Aeneas” on Chandos (0586), however, is no less a travesty than Harnoncourt’s “Fairy Queen.” The fault is less that of the conductor, Richard Hickox, than of the miscast Maria Ewing as Dido. Ewing seethes, steams and insinuates, where the Dido conceived by librettist Nahum Tate (drawing on Virgil’s “Aeneid”) is all regal, tragic dignity. Ewing, whose inapt histrionics are conveyed in a voice under less than perfect control, seems to confuse Queen Dido with sex-kitten Princess Salome. All they really have in common is being dumped, or dumped on, by their monomaniacal men.

Christie’s performance employs small forces to create an intimate, Classical tragedy; Hickox’s expansive tempos and relatively large orchestra and chorus (the members of Collegium Musicum 90) project a conventionally operatic--i.e., Romantic--picture of the brief, tragic affair between the Queen of Carthage and the Trojan Prince, the latter rather testily sung by Karl Daymond.

Intimacy returns in a collection of songs and instrumental pieces by Purcell, with a few by his older contemporary, John Blow, included for good measure (Harmonia Mundi 907167). They are performed with immense vitality and stylishness by the Arcadian Academy, members of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra???, directed from the keyboard by Nicholas McGegan. Christine Brandes brings her sweet, sometimes appealingly tart, perfectly tuned soprano to such charmers as “The Bashful Thames” and “Cupid, the Slyest Rogue Alive” and the dark splendors of “O Solitude” and “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation.” All are filled with Purcell’s expressive modulations and turns of phrase, still surprising, still “modern” three centuries after their creation.