Lost is my quiet

Perhaps the best-known duet by an English composer is Sound the Trumpet from the sixth and last of Purcell’s birthday odes for Queen Mary, Come ye Sons of Art, on a text presumed to be by Nahum Tate. A setting of one of several episodes that refer to music, it makes brilliant use of the voices (countertenors in the original) to evoke not so much the sound as the figuration associated with the trumpet and then, with a change of theme, the oboe. It is done, incidentally, over a modulating two-bar ground bass in the accompaniment.

Lost is my quiet and What can we poor females do?, both of which exist also in solo versions, are two of over 50 partsongs by Purcell. As they demonstrate in their very different ways, he took every advantage of the textural opportunities offered by the medium. The 19th-century composers represented in the rest of the programme revived the art but never surpassed Purcell’s mastery of it.