It is nice these days to have a chance to hear some of Purcell’s church anthems sung by a choir of boys and men, a sound one imagines
to be nearer to what the composer knew than the cleanly blended one we have become familiar with from adult mixed-voice choirs. There’s the difference of course; the rightly renowned Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, with its 16 trebles, offers a thicker sound than would, well, The Sixteen, with less transparency, light or springy life – a shame in Purcell’s richly spiced counterpoint. But there is also an authenticity to it, an honesty and relevance to Purcell and his role in the history of English church music that cannot be resisted.

This selection presents some old favourites – both of the full-anthem type and the verse-anthem kind with soloists and strings – all making a fine case for Purcell’s genius, as usual. But also slotted in are two works by the man who conducted the Chapel Royal choir when Purcell was still among the trebles. Pelham Humfrey died even younger than Purcell, at 26, but his substantial and deeply penitential verse anthem O Lord my God suggests another talent sadly cut off. His Mag and Nunc are more functional, yet strong nevertheless.

It is in integrated works such as O Lord my God, where the expressive urgency of this recording’s excellent soloists can rub off, that the choir is at its best; less successful are the more patchwork pieces, where the switches between solo, choir and instrumental sections often lose their organic flow; how can the repeat of the ritornello in My beloved spake, for instance, sound so blithely unaffected by the tenderness of the music that has just preceded it? The recording (made in the St John’s Chapel) likewise seems afflicted by the difficulty of capturing all these elements in one convincing perspective, resulting in a sometimes gawky mix of the distant and the cramped. This is great music, and needs more expansiveness and wholeness than it gets here.