Recordings of Daniel Purcell's music are rare – in fact, I have only found one other recording of any of his sonatas, on a disc by Les Trésors d’Orphée on which solo and trio sonatas (for flute and recorder) are interspersed with cantatas (Stradivarius STR 33360, 1994). Known facts about Daniel Purcell are as rare as recordings of his works, but as Peter Holman's excellent booklet notes explain, Daniel Purcell was in fact probably not Henry Purcell's brother but a cousin. Daniel's use of the term ‘brother’ in the Preface to his Six Cantatas of 1713 was in keeping with seventeenth-century use of the word to describe members of an extended family. Much of the recent clarification of Daniel's early biography is in fact thanks to the research of Mark Humphreys, who has also established that Daniel Purcell was probably born around 1670 and not c1664 as given in Grove Music Online and other reference works (Humphreys, ‘Daniel Purcell: A Biography and Thematic Catalogue’ (DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2005)). Living as he did for more than twenty years after Henry Purcell's death, it is hard to see how Daniel's music can be heard solely as derivative of the older composer's style. In fact, as Holman points out, Daniel Purcell's compositions include styles and forms popular in England around 1700, among which is the solo sonata.

A choirboy at the Chapel Royal between 1678 and 1682, Daniel Purcell became organist at Magdalen College Oxford in 1688, moving to London in 1695 to finish Henry Purcell's semi-opera The Indian Queen. Thereafter, the majority of his works were composed for the London stage but he carried on working as an organist and was involved in public concerts. The establishment of the Italian opera company in London in 1707 necessitated a change in direction as public favour turned away from the old-style masques and semi-operas, and some of Daniel's sonatas date from this period.

For their recording Brooks and Pollock have chosen a combination of solo sonatas and music for harpsichord. The majority of the latter take the form of arrangements, and the recording includes most of Daniel Purcell's existing music for the instrument. The arrangements for harpsichord of ‘Lovely charmer’ (from Peter Anthony Motteux's semi-opera of 1699, The Island Princess) and ‘What ungrateful devil moves you’ (from Colley Cibber's play of 1696, Love's Last Shift) reflect the growing demand from amateurs at the time for arrangements of popular music from the stage. Both are arrangements of songs by Daniel, as is ‘Alass when charming Sylvia's gon’. Similarly, the Suite in D minor/major is an arrangement of a suite for strings, composed by Daniel for The Inconstant (Drury Lane, 1702), and the ‘Rondeau in B flat major’ is also thought to be an arrangement similarly reduced from a work for four-part strings. The only exception is the Toccata in A minor, which was published in The 2d Book of The Lady's Entertainment (1708). Of the works for violin and continuo, only one is an arrangement in the spirit of the works for harpsichord. The Chaconne appeared in The Second Part of the Division Violin (1705 edition) and is a reduced version of a piece from Daniel's music for The Unhappy Penitent (Drury Lane, 1701).

Daniel Purcell published two collections of solo sonatas for violin or flute (recorder). Constituting twelve sonatas in total (of which nine feature on this recording), they were designed to be interchangeable between the two instruments, with performers expected to transpose as required to fit each instrument. This was a common practice of the time and has been readily adopted by today's performers. The composer was heavily influenced by another prolific composer of sonatas for violin and/or recorder, Gottfried Finger. Finger's influence can be heard particularly in the upbeat nature of Daniel Purcell's 1698 collection of Six Sonatas, whose short movements add together to form a whistle-stop tour of ‘tunes’ amounting to an average of seven minutes in total for each sonata. The character of the second set of Six Sonatas, published around 1710, is slightly different – though no less cheerful – with traces of the Italian influence prevalent in London by that time in the form of slightly longer, more ornate movements.

Brooks's and Pollock's playing on this disc is superb. The relatively small tessitura of this repertoire has the potential to result in the violin sounding a little forced, with a constant high tension in the sound. However, Brooks never seems to run out of a variety of subtle nuances that relieve the tension, leaving the listener with pockets of sound in which to revel. The slow movements of the sonatas in D major and B minor are particularly delectable. The disc begins with the Toccata in A minor, and both the composition and subtle rendition of this slight piece (of just under one minute) are ideal for drawing the listener into the rest of this delightful disc. Pollock's playing is equally understated in the Suite in D minor, but he manages still to draw out a wide palette of colours from both the instrument and the composition.

All too often, discs of little-known or little-recorded works can turn out to be objects of curiosity, to be listened to once, and thereafter referred to solely for their novelty. However, this disc is a real gem for both the casual listener and the more informed listener, with its winning combination of informative booklet notes and insightful musical interpretation.