Purcell: The Fairy Queen
The Sixteen, Harry Christophers
Matthew Brook, Robin Blaze, Antonia Christophers
Cadogan Hall. 25 September 2024

There are many ways to perform Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, including a particularly energetic one at this year’s BBC Proms and another earlier in the year from HGO. In my review of the Proms version, I suggested that “… this must rank as one of the most inventive and entertaining” of the many versions of this musical extravaganza I have seen. I can now add this outstanding concert performance of Purcell’s music by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen to my list of favourites. Not only was it “inventive and entertaining” but, with the aid of one of the best programme booklets I have ever read and the lively, engaging and informative narrator, Antonia Christophers (I guess, a relation), the whole thing made perfect sense.

Purcell’s five masques bear a marginal and rather metaphysical relationship to Shakespeare’s play (explained here), concentrating on the dream-like world of the fairies. All five masques are introduced by Titania or Oberon, who may have originally been played by eight or nine-year-old children, alongside a wider cast of children. One of the previous productions I have reviewed included a bottom-numbingly-long version that attempted to recreate the original 1692 production with Purcell’s five masques interspersed between Acts of the spoken play, which is an appallingly turgid adaptation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Antonia Christophers’ narration (with a text commissioned from Jeremy Sams) combined with the excellent programme booklet’s introductory essay and detailed descriptions, not only of the story behind each of the five masques, but also of the action of the play that surrounded them, helped clarify things for this old hand and, I imagine, to anybody who had not experienced it before.

The performance itself combined a nice balance between two acted comedy scenes with a more straightforward concert presentation, the lack of any staging or props providing some of the amusing aspects of the narration. The acted scenes were, perhaps inevitably, the Drunken Poet and Coridon and Mopsa. Matthew Brook starred in both comedy routines, his drunken poet getting into character from the start, with an array of bottles around his seat. He was joined by The Sixteen’s other guest singer, Robin Blaze, as Mopsa. Both excelled in these and the more sedate numbers, as did the impressice soloist members of The Sixteen: Katy Hill, Charlotte Mobbs and Alexandra Kidgell sopranos, Mark Dobell and Oscar Golden Lee tenors and Ben Davies baritone. I liked Harry Christophers’ arrangement of the 18-strong choir, with the six sopranos in the centre of the front row, given a nice focus against the wider spread lower voices.

The instrumentalists who featured most strongly were the outstanding continuo cellist Joseph Crouch, whose expressive playing added much to the more intimately accompanied solos, harpist Joy Smith, who included some effective percussive moments, Alexandra Bellamy and Sarah Humphries, oboes and recorders, and Thomas Allery and Eligio Luis Quinteiro playing continuo harpsichord and theorbo/guitar. Harry Christophers’ direction was spot on, with its focus on detail and instrumental colour.