This King Arthur is a giddy triumph for its artists. Blazing their way through the score, the performers set a new benchmark, delivering a production that’s equally gutsy and gorgeous…Dance meters swing, and grand choruses are crisp and alluring. Amorous ensembles ooze passion, with guest soprano Sophie Junker irresistible as Cupid…Director Lionel Meunier is the real star, with a soaring vision of Purcell’s music in a class of its own.

Delightfully fresh and subtle in its musicianship. By and large English performers prefer a more rumbustious take on Purcell, but Meunier’s lighter touch is well judged. Some other recordings feature more obviously starry singers, but Vox Luminis fields a likeable array of mostly light, period voices, who live up to the enchantment of their setting. Purcell’s music is so irrepressibly tuneful and imaginative. How could anybody go wrong?

[Vox Luminis] harvest the fruits of Purcell and Dryden’s collaborative imagination with affectionate lucidity. The band never sounds as small as it actually is…The playing has admirable finesse… The Saxons’ heathen sacrifices in Act 1 flow with unerring pacing and harmonic shaping…It has been decades since a recording of any of Purcell’s operas as enjoyable as this.

[Vox Luminis’s] main strength likes in the capability of all its members to step forward as soloists. This works particularly well in a work like King Arthur with its many small cameo roles…But it is the fine ensemble, precise chording and articulation in the ensembles and choruses that are the chief glory of the performance, the use of Francophone singers if anything accentuating the clarity of diction. Among the soloists the sweetly-voiced high tenor Olivier Berten steals the honours.