Henry Purcell (1659-1695): Trio Sonatas (from the Second Book of 10)

00:00 Sonata in F major (Golden Sonata) No. 9: Allegro - Adagio - Canzona (Allegro) - Grave - Allegro 09:04 Sonata in C No. 7: Vivace - Largo - Canzona (with Grave intro.) - Allegro - Adagio 17:42 Sonata in B minor No. 1: Adagio - Canzona (Moderato) - Largo - Vivace non troppo 25:45 Sonata in D No. 10: Adagio - Canzona (Allegro) - Grave - Largo & Allegro 32:21 Sonata in D minor No. 4: Adagio - Canzona (Moderato) - Adagio & Vivace - Largo 40:26 Sonata in E flat No. 2: Adagio - Canzona (Allegro) - Adagio - Largo - Allegro 49:49 Sonata in G minor No. 8: Adagio - Canzona (Moderato) - Grave & Largo - Vivace Giorgio Ciompi & Werner Torkanowsky, violins George Koutzen, cello / Herman Chessid, harpsichord Henry Purcell, despite great fame in the history of music and a talent so universally conceded even in his own day that contemporaries felt no need to describe him as other than “famous”, is in our time a man whose music is more honored in encyclopedias than in performance. The reason for this is that he was so completely a man of his own day and age that it would require an unusual absorption in the tastes, techniques, and attitudes of the period of Charles II, James II, and William and Mary to make a large part of his musical output significant today. The exceptions would seem to be thus far his wonderful opera, Dido and Aeneas, the impressive Fantasias, and the beautiful Trio Sonatas, issued in two groups of twelve (1683) and ten (1697). The blight of “occasional” music lies witheringly on much of the rest. Countless odes celebrate royal births, deaths, welcomes, etc. in music that is festive and spacious but that is set to singularly sophomoric and graceless doggerel, the pointlessness of which is eked out by stirring solos and choruses, elaborate instrumental obbligatos, or florid word-painting. The religious anthems are showy, theatrical — in a word, fashionable entertainment for the Stuart entourage — actually the same secular music as the odes but set to Biblical texts. The incidental music written for more than forty stage works is often surpassingly lovely and deserves hearing, but there is even less likelihood than in Handel’s case that pompous drivel of the texts will be revived so that we may hear the music in its proper setting, and there is, too, the stumbling-block of finding counter-tenors and florid basses to essay its difficulties. As for the ribald, bawdy tavern catches, so completely delightful, their tendency to call a spade a spade does not set too well with wide strata of today’s audiences. Great as Purcell’s musical merit, he nevertheless cheerfully and indefatigably served (and never transcended spiritually) an empty-headed uncultured court, bare of literary talent, venal, superstitious, morally cynical, ostentatiously posturing, and reducing all but chamber music into an ornamental gesture of homage in its direction. In the Handelian age, under more sensitive patronage, his art could have flowered in opera and concerto. With regard to Purcell the man, we are met with practically the same blankness as in the case of Shakespeare. A short life, a musical family, innumerable musical posts (to ensure a livelihood because the king was habitually in arrears to his musicians), general acclaim, three children who died in infancy, burial in Westminster Abbey on the eve of the St. Cecelia’s Day that he had so often commemorated — this is practically the sum total of our information. Actually, an important fragment of our knowledge about him comes from a preface which Purcell wrote in 1683 to his Trio Sonatas which like his Fantasias of two years before were not commissioned works but the fruit of his comparative studies in the contrapuntal tradition. It reveals his high regard for Italian models (perhaps Matteis and Vitali), a regard which extended to his spelling of ‘Fantazias’ and to the naming of one of his sons John Baptista. “For its Author, he has faithfully endeavored a just imitation of the most famel Italian masters, principally to bring the seriousness and gravity of that sort of Musick into vogue and reputation among our Country-men whose humour, ‘tis time now, should begin to loathe the levity and balladry of our neighbors (i.e. the French). The Author has no more to add but his hearty wishes that his Book may fall into no other hands but theirs who carry Musickal Souls about them; for he is willing to flatter himself into a belief that with such his labors will seem neither unpleasant nor unprofitable.”