Blow reviews

Not only did John Blow vacate the organ loft of Westminster Abbey to make way for Purcell. Outliving his pupil by over a decade, he compounded the compliment with an exquisitely crafted, recorders-enriched Ode on the Death of My Henry Purcell. This supplies the centrepiece of Arcangelo’s new disc, which interleaves four odes with chamber music including an affable sonata and two works based on a recurring bass: a G minor Ground not quite matching the intensity of Purcell’s famous Chacony, plus a G major Chaconne oozing contrapuntal vitality. 

Behind Sophie Yates’s fanciful title lurks a tautly structured programme. Eight pieces are arranged in chronological order and played on two modern copies, both of French harpsichords. The earlier one has a rich sound, plummy warmth in the bass with a clean fresh upper register – perfect for John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, and a Suite by William Croft. The period tuning is beautifully sonorous in the limited key-range of this first half of Yates’s cherry-picking journey through 18th century musical London.

These two big variation works are among Arthur Bliss’s most important orchestral utterances. The 1955 Meditations on a Theme by John Blow was the first Feeney Trust commission for the CBSO, and in it Bliss clearly revisited his memories of service in the trenches during the Great War, where he lost so many friends, within a quasi-programmatic succession of variations that allude to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.