Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment . Cappella Amsterdam . Gustav Leonhardt

In 1683 several leading musicians in London founded a Musical Society to hold an annual celebration of the feast day of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music. They did this in a public performance of a musical ode which they commissioned specially. The first fortunate composer was the young Henry Purcell. This is certainly no coincidence, since he was one of the society's founders. That very year saw a performance of his first ode to Cecilia, 'Welcome to all the pleasures', a delightfully sensitive and subtle work that perfectly illustrated how idiomatically Purcell could handle the English language. The many purely instrumental passages are also striking. Precisely nine years later Purcell wrote another ode to Cecilia, this time on a larger scale. 'Hail, bright Cecilia' is the apotheosis of the choral ode in seventeenth-century England: it comprises no less than thirteen parts in which not only the chorus and the soloists are able to let their hair down, but also countless obligato instruments in their expressive, virtuoso parts. 'Now does the glorious day appear' is an ode for the birthday of Queen Mary from 1689, one of Purcell's many captivating 'birthday' odes.