No grand tour of the trio sonata literature would be complete without visiting the Les nations of François Couperin. The Purcell Quartet has already recorded music by the Italians Corelli and Vivaldi, the Germans Schütz, Biber and Bach, the English Lawes and Purcell, the Frenchman Leclair and the uncategorisable Handel. No English writer of the 20th-century revival has been more closely associated with these works than Couperin’s biographer Wilfrid Mellers, the writer of the sleeve notes. The Purcell Quartet never does things by halves, so because only two of the four Nations appear on this CD, we may hope that this is the first of a set. The group is joined by Susanna Pell, like Richard Boothby a member of Fretwork. These two play alone in the ‘Douzième Concert à deux Violes’, their tone beautifully blended and bow strokes immaculately matched, and they effectively counterbalance the two violins throughout Couperin’s ravishing La Sultane, but especially in the antiphonal passages in the final Légèrement.

Couperin’s Les nations is a compilation from 1726 of early and later works married for the sake of publication. The earliest parts of ‘La Françoise’ and ‘L’Espagnole’, dating from the early 1690s, are the sonades – Italianate sonate da camera inspired by Corelli’s Opp 1 and 3 – on tracks 1 and 18; to them Couperin appended French dance suites (tracks 2-9 and 19-27) three decades later. When he presented the sonades to his first audience, he did so anonymously because he hoped they might be taken as native Italian music. When he decided to add a French suite to each of them, he made a virtue of the congruence of styles, by issuing them with new names and the cover title.

A good performance of these works must then aim to switch styles midway through each work. This would seem to have been the aim of the Purcell Quartet, for they play the sonade with a bright, Italian accent and the suite with a French one. If there is a quibble, it is that overlaying both is an unmistakable hint of English accent; in the French works in particular an English directness of manner is evident. But I would be the last to condemn a native accent in foreign territory.