Dioclesian
The Indian Queen
The Tempest
Timon of Athens
Hail! Bright Cecilia
Come Ye Sons of Art
Queen Mary’s Funeral Music
Music for the Chapels Royal
Soundtrack for England, My England
Nancy Argenta, Lynne Dawson, Gillian Fisher, Rosemary Hardy, Dinah Harris, Felicity Lott, Elizabeth Priday, Gill Ross, Jennifer Smith Sopranos
Suan Graham, Carol Hall Mezzo-sopranos
James Bowman, Charles Brett, Michael Chance, Brian Gordon, Cristopher Robson, Ashley Stafford, John Williams Countertenors
Paul Agnew, Rogers Covey-Crump, Maldwyn Davies, John Elwes, Wynford Evans, Paul Elliott, Martyn Hill Tenors
Thomas Allen, Peter Harvey, Stephen Varcoe Baritones
Roderick Earle, Owen Grundy, David Thomas, John Tomlinson Basses
David Blackadder Trumpet
Monteverdi Choir
English Baroque Soloists
Equale Brass Ensemble
Monteverdi Orchestra
John Eliot Gardiner Conductor
Erato 0190296416231
9 CDs
Budget price
The Review
To have all these seminal recordings in one box is terrific. For many years they set the standards for Purcell recordings, vocally and instrumentally, with Gardiner being the conductor who took over from Benjamin Britten in taking the major works from the 1690s seriously.
Indeed, it was a jolt to see quite how many years. The superb account of Come, Ye Sons of Art and Queen Mary’s Funeral Music was made in 1976 and has soloists who became very famous a decade later in music from subsequent centuries – Felicity Lott,Thomas Allen and John Tomlinson (like Gardiner, all knighted since). That disc is full of some of the most poignant music, especially when one realises that Come, Ye Sons of Art, probably the best musical birthday present ever given before Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, was for Queen Mary’s last, only her 32nd, and less than a year before Purcell had to write the funeral music after she had died of small-pox; heard again in Westminster Abbey eight months later for his own service.
For most of these discs, Gardiner was faithful to his favoured singers, especially Lynne Dawson, Gillian Fisher, Jennifer Smith, Paul Elliot and Stephen Varcoe – and that consistency of sound means that the extended set hangs together remarkably well. Today the fashion is for more florid and decorated playing, larger continuo groups and more soprano-like countertenors. I’m not convinced today’s way is an improvement, though it can be exciting. Thomas Betterton’s theatre in the early 1690s was catering to a more serious public than in the heady days of Charles II’s court. That of William III and Mary II was soberly Protestant – indeed William was very Calvinist and Mary, whom he had married when she was fifteen, seems to have been rather prim. The country had been through a second revolution in forty years and in the aftermath, something of the restraint of the Commonwealth years had returned, though without its restrictions or viciousness.
The semi-operas, actor-manager Betterton’s compromise between writing substantial spoken theatre works based on history and myth but with masques interpolated into the plot, were an attempt to balance popular taste with the political requirement to have a clear patriotic point. For the dramatist John Dryden, who had backed Mary’s father, James II, and so lost his poet laureate-ship at the revolution (it was given to his arch rival, Thomas Shadwell) King Arthur and The Indian Queen were welcome sources of work to show he was still relevant in London’s new political landscape.
John Eliot Gardiner’s recordings reflect all this. There is rustic fun where necessary but the overall sense of this set is not of London at play but settling down to the beginnings of life under the Bill of Rights – calmer, reflecting, if not quite modern democracy, at least a move on from England’s autocratic past. If Mary was torn between affection for her father and rejection of monarchic absolutism, the latter won. Dryden, Betterton and Purcell were attempting to work out a dramatic form which was not opera (too Catholic) but not unalleviated words. Putting together a revised version of drama and the masque made political and theatrical sense. In many ways it was the same solution twentieth century composers like Rogers and Hammerstein and Bernstein and Sondheim discovered in the reformed musical, though in the 17th century version few of the speaking actors did any complicated singing.
The interloper in this set is the disc of extracts taken from the soundtrack for Tony Palmer’s wonderful 1995 TV film based on Purcell’s life, England, My England, made for his tercentenary which was written by the astonishing writing team of John Osborne and Charles Wood (Dryden would probably have been chuffed). This repeats some of the repertoire in the earlier discs, though with soloists more familiar from that decade, for example Nancy Argenta as Cupid in King Arthur.
I have come to love these recordings. They are, after all, the ones made by my generation of musicians. They may feel too straight-laced for present tastes but their very lack of frills makes them versions that stand the test of time and many listenings.
SM