Luogo e data di registrazione		Doopsgezinde Kerk, Haarlem (Holland): - 5/7 Gennaio 1994 (1,2,3,5,8,10) - 16 Maggio 1994 (4,6,7,9)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineer / Editing		Stephan Schellmann (Tritonus): 4,6,7,9 Markus Heiland (Tritonus): 1,2,3,5,8,10
	Prima Edizione LP		Nessuna
	Edizione CD		Sony "Vivarte" | LC 6868 | SK 53 981 | 1 CD - durata 76' 48" | (p) 1995 | DDD
	Cover Art		Mattia Preti (1613-1699): Christ in Glory with the Saints. The Bridgeman art Library, London
	Note		-

Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was essentially a church musician in his youth. His father and uncle became members of the Chapel Royal, the royal choir, when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, and he became a choirboy in in the Chapel in, probably, 1668 or 1669, when he was nine or ten. He left the Chapel Royal in 1673, when his voice broke, but was retained at court, and was given the post of composer to the Twenty-Four Violins (the royal string orchestra) in 1677 - largely, it seems, to allow him to compose verse anthems with strings. In 1679 he succeeded his teacher John Blow as organist of Westminster Abbey, and in 1682 he became one of the three organists of the Chapel Royal. He retained this post until his death, but his activities in the Chapel declined after the death of Charles II in 1685, for the new king, James II, was openly a Catholic, and attended services in a Catholic chapel at Whitehall; William and Mary scaled down the activities of the royal music after 1689, and so after then Purcell spent most of his time writing music for London's theatres. For this reason most of his anthems date from the reign of Charles II. The works on this CD are all examples of the most glamorous type of Restoration church music, the “symphony anthem", scored for a group of soloists, a three- or four-part violin band, choir and continuo. The genre owed its existence to the personal taste of Charles II, “a brisk & Airy Prince, comeing to the Crown in the flow'r, & vigour of his Age", who, in the famous words of Thomas Tudway (a fellow Chapel Royal choirboy with Purcell), was soon “tyr’d w(i)th the Grave & Solemn way, And Order’d the Composers of his Chapell, to add Symphonies &c w(i)th Instruments to their Anthems". But the symphony anthem was always something of an exotic plant. With its interplay between a group of soloists, a small string group, and the choir, it was specifically designed to exploit the layout of the chapel at Whitehall: the soloists and the strings were placed in galleries, while the choral singers were in their choir-stalls on the floor of the building. Moreover, symphony anthems were only heard in the chapel on feast days, when the king was present, and were not composed after l689, except for state occasions such as coronations. The earliest anthem recorded here is undoubtedly "My Beloved Spake". It exists in two versions, the later of which was already in existence before the end of 1677, for it appears in a Chapel Royal manuscript in which Blow is referred to throughout as “Mr” - he received a Lambeth doctorate on December 10th of that year. The work, a setting of familiar lines from the Song of Solomon, is a bold and confident essay in the manner of the court composer Pelham Humfrey (c.1648-1674), who did more than anyone to establish the genre of the symphony anthem. It begins with a minuet-like symphony which Purcell greatly expanded in the revised version, presumably because it seemed too slight to begin a work of more than 300 bars. The vocal sections that follow are largely in Humfrey’s style, consisting either of expressive duple-time passages in the declamatory style, or sections of minuet-like triple time. Restoration composers still associated the violin with dance music, and so tended to put a good deal of dance-like music into their symphony anthems. The complex “patchwork" design also owes much to Humfrey. There are twelve changes of time and the symphony is repeated in the middle, effectively dividing the work into two halves. “My Beloved Spake" is a notable achievement for a teenager, and it is no accident that the work, with its fresh and sensuous evocation of spring, has always been one of Purcell’s most popular anthems. “O Praise God in His Holiness”, “In Thee, O Lord, Do I Put my Trust“ and “Rejoice in the Lord Alway" were copied by Purcell into a sequence of symphony anthems at the front of the third of his large score-books, now in the British Library. Purcell seems to have started this section of the manuscript in 1681, and finished it around the time of Charles II’s death in 1685. We can date the individual items reasonably accurately by virtue of their position in the sequence: “O Praise God" (no. 2) probably dates from 1681, “In Thee, O Lord" (no. 4) from 1682, and “Rejoice in the Lord Alway" (no. 9) from 1683. In these three anthems Purcell largely retained Humfrey's idiom, but also brought in some new types of writing, widening the range of the musical language. The symphony of “O Praise God in His Holiness” begins with a passage of complex counterpoint instead of the usual homophonic section of dotted notes of the French overture, while “In Thee, O Lord, Do I Put my Trust" begins and ends with ground basses: the expressive symphony is based on the same rising ground as Purcell's song “O Solitude, My Sweetest Choice", while the whole of the Alleluia is set to a vigorous two-bar ground. “Rejoice in the Lord Alway", the famous “Bell Anthem" (so-called because the opening symphony is based on a descending octave peal of “bells” in the bass), is virtually in rondeau form with no fewer than seven repetitions of the catchy minuet-like theme. “Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem" is a rather later work, written for the coronation of William and Mary in Westminster Abbey on April 11, 1689. Much larger forces than usual were available, including the combined choirs of the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, and the complete Twenty-Four Violins; and so the work is laid out on a grand scale, with a more prominent role for the choir than was usual in symphony anthems. The work reflects Purcell’s increasing interest in Italian music. Instead of the usual French-style overture, the work begins with a series of grave chords in a rising pattern followed by a passage of dense counterpoint, and then by the customary fugue. The immediate model for this movement was the symphony of the ode that Giovanni Battista Draghi wrote for the 1687 St Cecilia celebrations; Purcell was much influenced by it around 1690. Another Italianate feature is the verse passage at the words “Be thou exalted, Lord", which is accompanied by the full strings; until the late 1680s English composers nearly always alternated passages for instruments and solo voices. The three voluntaries by Matthew Locke (c.1622-1677) heard here may be taken, in a sense, as “demonstration” works. As a rule, voluntaries were improvised, and those few that survive through notation may represent only basic sketches of the genre as it was actually performed in Restoration England. The present voluntaries exist in a collection of works gathered under the title Melothesia. This collection is an important one; its preface contains the earliest known explanation of the English rules for figured hass realization. Matthew Locke was organist of the Catholic chapel of Catherine of Braganza. He was a close friend to Henry Purcell, and worked considerable influence on the younger man’s style. Upon Locke’s death in 1677, Purcell inherited his position as Composer-in-Ordinary to the Kings Violins. © 1994 Peter Holman