There were Purcell concerts all over the world during the tercentenary celebrations in 1995, and virtually every note of his music was available on CD at that time. But interest seems to have declined since 1995; certainly, many of the recordings made then are no longer available.

In Britain we still tend to hear the same few works-Dido and Aeneas, the odes Come ye sons of art and Welcome to all the pleasures, the anthems Rejoice in the Lord alway and O sing unto the Lord, and a few late songs-while most of his output stays on the shelves.

This is particularly unfortunate since Purcell is one of the few seventeenth-century composers whose output is on a consistently high level. Once he had found his compositional voice as a teenager he hardly seemed capable of writing a boring or lacklustre piece.

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