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Alon Schab, Heav’nly harmony, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 130–132, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/car122
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It has been more than two-and-a-half years since the first two volumes of the Purcell Society Edition Companion Series were reviewed on these pages (Early Music, xxxvii/2 (2009), pp.316–20). Those first volumes (Grabu's Albion and Albanius and Blow's Venus and Adonis), together with the third volume reviewed here, an edition of Giovanni Battista Draghi's Cecilian Ode From harmony, from heav’nly harmony, form an important trilogy of Purcell's immediate models for his ‘dramatick operas’, all-sung opera and later odes respectively.
Of the three composers chosen to open the new Companion Series, Draghi is the most enigmatic, and his few biographical sketches are full of expressions of ‘perhaps’ and ‘may have’. I find him a fascinating composer, mainly thanks to a single piece—the G minor Sonata in British Library Add. Ms.33236 (there attributed to ‘Mons[ieur] Baptiste’) that will appear in the fourth volume of the Companion Series (Restoration trio sonatas, forthcoming). This work, ‘the only trio sonata written in Restoration England apart from Blow's Sonata in A major that can stand comparison with Purcell's sonatas’ (Peter Holman, ‘The Italian connection: Giovanni Battista Draghi and Henry Purcell’, Early Music Performer, 22 (2008), pp.4–19), is truly an extraordinary piece, and the hope to find some of its brilliance also in the 1687 Cecilian Ode made the reading of this new edition a fascinating search.
