These are the fantasies Purcell wrote as a young man more or less in the style of the out-dated Jacobean fantasies for viols without, or probably without, a keyboard instrument. The best are the 12 for three or for four viols, but there is also one with a fifth part all on one note and two in six and seven parts based on the old In Nomine theme. Especially in the four-part fantasias Purcell made his contrapuntal ingenuities marvellously piquant with a pinging hailstorm of harmonic clashes. Mozart is rightly admired for his Dissonance Quartet; Purcell's Fantasia No. 7 has a first section with equally memorable and indeed disturbing dissonances, more extreme, I think, than in anything else he wrote.
The London Baroque players give a more authentic performance than their rivals on Archiv Produktion. The music sounds a semitone down, and though the tone seems harsh and scraping at first, you soon accept it. They appreciate that a double barline implies a repeat, and they rightly play the first sections of Nos. 5 and 9 twice. (They do nothing about the strange double barline in No. 6, and goodness knows what that means.) In the Ulsamer Collegium performance the music is played at modern concert pitch and with a quality a good deal closer to string tone of today. They add a few editorial trills but make no repeats. The result is immediately appealing, and partly because they have been better recorded. There is excessive resonance on the new LP and it sometimes muddies the part-writing. In any case the balance, usually first rate, is not always so; for instance early in No. 4 the third instrument is very hard to pick out. I would be rooting for this new version were it not for the resonance; I prefer its style of playing. But both are well able to give great pleasure, thanks to Purcell.'