Purcell Arthur

Just 36 years lived Henry Purcell, but in this short life he proved to be enormously productive. In addition to chamber and church music and at least 60 festive and pompous music Purcell composed mainly for the stage. With Dido and Aeneas he created his only classical opera. In the field of his influenced form of semi-opera, in which drama and music were linked together, he left behind masterpieces such as King Arthur and The Fairy Queen. From these two semi-operas, the Vox Orchestra, which specializes in historical performance practice, under the direction of Lorenzo Ghirlanda, has now recorded a suite of instrumental movements. Purcell also has an instrumental suite of his first semi-opera Dioclesian (1690). In addition, pieces from the incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest (The Storm) can be heard, which Matthew Locke composed in 1674. With these lively suites, often inspired by English folk music, the young, international Vox Orchestra and the Swiss conductor and orchestra founder Lorenzo Ghirlanda present instrumental works by England's then most famous composer after John Dowland and before the arrival of George Frideric Handel in London.

Vox Luminis already boasts an impressive discography, orientated mainly towards sacred music and German repertoire (its album devoted to music by Heinrich Schütz won the Gramophone ‘Best Recording of the Year’ Award in 2013). Now this ensemble, founded nearly fifteen years ago by Lionel Meunier, has scaled one of the summits of English music: the legend of King Arthur and his mentor the wizard Merlin inspired one of Henry Purcell’s most popular successes, King Arthur, a semi-opera on which Purcell lavished all his exuberant musical and theatrical inventiveness.

The young, virtuoso a cappella ensemble VOCES8 return to disc on Signum with a sumptuous collection of early works by Henry Purcell, one of England’s greatest composers. Joined by the specialist early music ensemble ‘Les Inventions’, the group explores Purcell’s astoundingly diverse output. There is hardly a genre in which he did not express himself: anthems, odes, funeral music, semi–operas, masques, sonatas, consort–music, songs and catches populate his extraordinarily multifaceted oeuvre. It is this astonishing diversity that Signum and VOCES8 celebrate.

Henry Purcell and librettist John Dryden never dreamed of a production of King Arthur like this one, where Merlin descends to the stage via a sailboard, and where Arthur and his rival, the Saxon King Oswald, fight a boxing match ("Round One! Box!") for a unified England and for the love of Emmeline. The work's extensive spoken passages – longer than those which are sung – are performed in German by actors, while the vocal music is performed in the original English by singers. The libretto, in addition to being lengthened, has been updated and now contains references to video cameras, the Bayreuth Festival, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and to Maestro Harnoncourt himself… Raymond Tuttle

Henry Purcell - Purcell Edition vol. IV - Instrumental Music (5CD) 2009
MP3 320 kbps | Tracks: 97 (5CD) | 5:08:37 | 721 Mb
Genre: Classical, Instrumental | Label: Warner Classics

Henry Purcell was an English composer. Although incorporating Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, Purcell's legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music. He is generally considered to be one of the greatest English composers; no other native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar.