Theatre of Musicke is the title of the New London Consort's current series of concerts, the aim of which is to remind us that some of the finest music ever written for the stage was composed in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This is, of course, a tricky period in musical history, largely because we have lost sight of many of the theatrical forms with which composers worked.

Opera, dominated by Handel, was - and in some respects still is - a posh import, as far as the UK was concerned. The principal genres during the Restoration were the masque and the hybrid mixture of speech and song, hideously dubbed "the semi-opera" of which Purcell was the greatest exponent. The texts included the now notorious Shakespearian rewrites by people such as Dryden that are now consigned to the shelves of academia. The Consort's founder-director, Philip Pickett, argues that such forms were the precursors of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Broadway musical. In this case, however, the tragedy is that in consigning the theatrical forms to oblivion, we have have also forgotten much of the music.

And what music some of it is. Soprano Julia Gooding and bass-baritone Michael George did wonders with a chunk of John Blow's deliriously suggestive Venus and Adonis, and celebrated the "pleasures divine in love and wine" to be found in Purcell's incidental music for Thomas Shadwell's rewrite of Timon of Athens. The same score, along with Purcell's The Indian Queen, provided some spectacular solos for trumpeter Mark Bennett. George also fulsomely evoked "wild Lapland's gothic night", which Thomas Linley associated with Macbeth's witches. Pickett, meanwhile, played his recorder beautifully and presided over the evening like a benevolent god. Glorious stuff, every second of it. And the New London Consort, mercifully, is going to provide us with the opportunity to hear more.