Old and New Perspectives of Henry Purcell

Last night the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) & Chorale concluded its 2020/VIRTUAL Salon Series with a program performed by six PBO instrumentalists entitled PURCELL: Something Old, Something New. Henry Purcell was at most 36 years old when he died (uncertainty due to lack of an official record of his birth); so the program title does not refer to the sorts of “early” and “late” periods we associate with Ludwig van Beethoven. Rather, in his remarks serving as host, PBO Music Director Richard Egarr explained that the program presented Purcell reflecting back on older forms while also cultivating newer ones.

Thus, the program began retrospection of about 100 years when the fantasia began to proliferate. Because the form was structured around free improvisation, it usually involved a solo part, either for keyboard or for a plucked instrument, such as a lute. Purcell’s fantasias captured the spirit of spontaneity but were written out for multiple parts. The Z. 742 fantasia in G major was performed by violinist Katherine Kyme, violists Maria Caswell and Aaron Westman, and William Skeen on gamba, capturing the spirit of past improvisational practices with a written through-composed score.

On the other hand the trio sonata was just beginning to emerge as a genre during Purcell’s lifetime. Kyme and Skeen were joined by violinist Noah Strick and harpsichordist Katherine Heater in a performance of the Z. 799 trio sonata in A major. This presented the “new” side of Purcell as an “early adopter” of a multi-instrument genre. In contrast, however, the Z. 807 sonata in G minor, which was published after Purcell’s death by his wife, consists only of a single chaconne movement, thus finding Purcell late in life reflecting once again on an older genre. The program then concluded with the “newer” Purcell’s venture into theater music. Kyme, Strick, Westman, Skeen, and Heater performed a suite of eight instrumental movements from the Z. 629 “semi-opera” The Fairy-Queen.

Katherine Kyme, William Strick, Katherine Heater, Aaron Westman, and Noah Strick playing instrumental selections from The Fairy-Queen (screen shot from the YouTube video of PURCELL: Something Old, Something New).

The entire program, including Egarr’s commentary, ran somewhat less than 40 minutes. As usual, the live video stream has now been stored as a YouTube file for subsequent viewing. This is definitely a trip worth taking. While Purcell tends to be better remembered for his vocal music, there is more than an ample supply of polyphonic inventiveness in the performances on this video. All six of the musicians were impressively expressive, thus endowing the give-and-take rhetoric of Purcell’s scores with engagingly personal accounts of the composer’s marks on paper.