No Swans turning themselves into Fairies, no watery Cascades, no Chorus of Chineses. Apart from the soprano Gillian Keith sporting two designer gowns in one evening, there was not a hint of vanity or extravagance in The Sixteen’s concert performance of Purcell’s most opulent semi-opera, The Fairy Queen. Forces were modest, the chorus solemn and dutiful and Harry Christophers conducted with a precision and long sense of line that minimised the effect of Purcell’s more sensuous harmonic scrunches.

The soloists allowed themselves a bit of fun when Jonathan Best, as a bibulous bass of a Drunken Poet, lurched into Christophers and gave the countertenor Iestyn Davies, as a coy Mopsa, a smackeroo of a kiss on his newly applied lippy. But that was all. Keith had the plum arias, and knew it, while Elin Manahan Thomas and Grace Davidson warbled sweetly as Fairies and Chinese Women.

The night before, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists had offered rather more high fibre, both in singing and in playing, in a Bach programme in anticipation of the forthcoming Feast of St Michael and All Angels (September 29). They began with a spooky little setting by Johann Christoph Bach, the cousin of J. S. Bach’s father, of the “war in heaven” episode from Revelation. As Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, two basses made the story echo and re-echo, and then ricochet off the roll of kettledrums and trumpets.

J. S. Bach’s own setting of Es erhub sich ein Streit was a much more upbeat affair, with voices, trumpets and drums chasing each other into battle and leading the righteous to heaven on Elijah’s fiery chariot, in an aptly glowing chorale. This cantata was framed by two further Michaelmas pieces: the excitingly paced Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir and a resonant and affirmatory final double chorus, Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft. Oh, and in between it all, a snatch of Handel’s Israel in Egypt (why not?), with the Monteverdi Choir and soloists relishing every verbal and musical evocation of frogs, blotches, blains, flies and lice, as only they know how.