Hyperion Records

This short verse anthem appears both in the British Museum’s ‘Egerton’ Manuscript collection and also in the York ‘Gostling’ partbooks. The copy of O praise the Lord in this latter collection was written out by Stephen Bing, and so we can be certain that Purcell composed the anthem before December 1681 when Bing died. The choir interject only two brief Alleluias; the remainder of the anthem, showing strongly Italianate influences, is given to two tenors.

The first section is in joyful triple metre, the soloists answering and prompting each other with their calls for the whole world to praise the Lord: the ‘merciful kindness’ ushers in an adventurously falling bass line, and the ‘truth of the Lord’, which ‘endureth for ever’, is illustrated with a sustained single note in both voices which cuts through the texture before it is interrupted by the first spirited chorus of Alleluias. For the Gloria the metre changes to duple time, the two voices again engaging in animated dialogue which grows in its complexity through to the extrovertly florid ‘world without end, Amen’ and the choir’s repeat of their animated Alleluias.

from notes by Robert King ©