Thursday’s programme, featuring the King’s Consort, was a winner, devoted to music written for the Chapel Royal in the 1680s and with wall-to-wall masterpieces in the second half. Using much the same forces as Purcell would have done (20 voices, eight instruments), in much the same size space and at the peculiarly high pitch that prevailed at the Chapel Royal, this performance got as close as possible to how the music must have originally sounded. And though the vocal blend was raw (especially among the trebles, who were drawn from different choirs) it made the point that 17th-century choirs pre-dated David Willcocks and had not discovered Anglican cathedral tone. With vigorous, exciting singing, glorious music and engagingly informed asides from King himself, I’d recommend this series heart-ily – if you could only get a ticket Every night, apparently, is sold out. So it’s returns or nothing.`Purcell Festival’: Wigmore, W1, 071-935 2141, continues Thurs.. IN JUNE 1660 Samuel Pepys and his cousin Edward Montagu set off for France aboard the Naseby.
Being musical types, they had brought along their viols and gitterns but they lacked percussion, so they put some coins inside a pair of candlesticks and lo, they had cymbals Their trip was, you might say, significant. On the return journey, the ship was renamed The Royal Charles and its passenger was the about-to-be restored Stuart king
That was the year Pepys began his diary. Though we tend to think of him as an old roue, he was in fact only 26. His life spanned the most dramatic events of the century and he was always at their hub. But Julia Eisner’s “Friday Feature” was the first programme about him not even to mention the Great Fire.
It was concerned with music, which was, for Pepys, The Thing of the World That I Love Most (R3). It sparkled with wit and good humour and dazzled in its re-creation of the boundless enthusiasm of this most appealing Restoration yuppie.
Alex Jennings played Pepys with dash and verve. We heard him recount his progression from a Puritan disapproval of jigs and frivolity to a firm resolve, not only to dance himself, but to get his wife dancing. At one point he feared he had gone too far and developed a furious jealousy of her interest in the dancing master, checking to see whether she was wearing her drawers and gloomily predicting: “I fear I shall go near to lose my command over her”.
We heard his own first tentative compos-itions, exquisitely played by Lucie Skeaping’s City Waites, and we followed him as he tried to understand the movement away from composing in hexachords and gamuts towards thinking in terms of a G minor scale. He gave up in the end and, with typical self-confidence,decided to devise his own system.Packed with information and leavened with humanity, this was the best kind of radio documentary. As it ended, Pepys was giving his opinion of “little Pelham Humphrey”, also newly returned from France and “an absolute monsieur”. To hear his boasting, wrote the disgruntled diarist, “would make a man piss”. Yet it was Humphrey who was to be the teacher of this year’s star composer, Henry Purcell. The tercentenary began with a full broadcast of Purcell’s extraordinary work The Fairy Queen (R3).
