Olivia Chaney: celebrating Henry Purcell, the bawdy baroque populist

Whether raunchy or religious, everything Purcell wrote had the same unstuffy grit. Ahead of her show at the London festival of baroque music, the folk star pays tribute to champion of the vernacularWhen I was nine or so, a nymph-like young woman with long blond plaits and steel-rimmed specs (think Joni Mitchell meets Virginia Woolf) came to teach me and my friends in Oxford Girls’ Choir “baroque dancing” on Saturday mornings.I’m not sure how authentic our interpretation...

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