Luogo e data di registrazione		Hervormde Kerk, Bennebroek (Holland) - 10/12 Aprile 1967
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9506-A (Stereo) - AWT 9506-A (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 47' 16" | (p) 1967 | ANA Telefunken "Reference" | 6.41222 AQ | 1 LP - durata 47' 16" | (p) 1967 | ANA | Riedizione
	Edizione CD		Teldec Classics | LC 6019 | 3984-21768-2 | 2 CDs - durata 50' 30" - 60' 53" | (c) 1998 | ADD
	Cover		"Henry Purcell", painting by Closterman. National Gallery, London.
	Note		-

The Overture in D minor, like most of Purcell’s works with this title, is an overture of the French type, such as Charles II’s exiled court society would often have heard in Versailles. The slow introduction spices the consistently dotted rhythm with melodic and harmonic chromaticism and constant concealment of the cadences. The following Allegro in 6/4 time combines the principles of the French overture, which prescribe a fugato for this section, with the English tradition of the consort-canzona, in which two different themes are treated in canon, one after the other. The closing Andante refers back to the introduction in rhythm and tempo, but introduces a new motif which retains its individuality and its melancholy, resigned expression through Purcell’s favourite downward leap of the diminished fifth. The Pavane in B flat major probably belongs to Purcell’s earliest works and, like the other pavanes on our record, was very likely composed before 1680. Its relationship to the English consort tradition is obvious; the first section is full and proceeds placidly, led by a nobly melancholy melody; the second part is more lively, with a canzona rhythm, strongly chromatic both in melody and harmony and thus more emotional. The Ground (i. e. ostinato) in D minor is the adaptation for harpsichord of an aria from the birthday ode for Queen Mary Crown the altar, deck the shrine, which Purcell had written in 1693. The layout of the movement, which builds up a clear da capo form over a five-bar ground bass repeated thirteen times, corresponds to this origin. With its writtenout arpeggios in the left hand and its graceful little ornaments, the small piece is written with great elegance, entirely in the spirit of the virginalists of the Golden Age. The Overture to the suite in G major follows the French model more faithfully than the D minor Overture, in that after the slow introduction it introduces only one fugal theme - one of the lively, near-dance triadic themes which Purcell loved. The following Air is also stamped with triadic melodies, but with those of the high baroque sarabande with its noble, broad melodic arches, which later only Handel was to write so simply and yet so intensively as Purcell. The Bourrée is at first sight a completely “French” movement of courtly refinement, but at the ends of the lines with their stressed repeated crotchets Purcell’s affection for his native folk music surprisingly breaks through the elegant, unruffled surface, noticeably and amusingly. Even the very concise and simple Menuet with its cheerful syncopations has something of this delightful mixture of court and rustic spheres. An Air, just as concise and serious, is finally followed by a wholly English Jigg - not a French Gigue - in 6/4 time, with wide intervals and a wittily accentuated, again almost robustly rustic rhythm. The Pavane in A minor is far more artistic and more intense in expression than the B flat Pavane. The first of the three main parts, almost unbrokenly for tutti and with the stress on the melody, is permeated with intense chromaticism, which in the less rigid second part, imitative of a concertante, grows even stronger in chromatically rising lines, downward diminished fifths and surprising cadences. The third part introduces a melodically new imitation theme, which in rhythm however harks back to the second part, and from a chromatically rising bass line culminates in a splendid final cadence. Even more clearly than in this piece, which by all traditional standards is unusually expressive, Purcell’s early mastery shows itself in the large-scale Fantasia in D major, which is a “fantasia on a ground”, and therefore a chaconne and perhaps (likewise originating from before 1680) the first of the great chaconnes for which, in instrumental as in vocal music, Purcell was to be special famous. The short four-bar ostinato motif is stated 28 times, though it is really no more than a traditional cadence pattern (the celebrated Romanesca bass); above this is unfolded a movement for three voices of deliberate diversity which culminates in a splendid ending, which intensifies the sarabande-like inflexion of the opening by means of scintillating major-minor alternations and seemingly exhausted, sighing, sinking: motifs, and which thus forges the link back to the beginning of the gigantic movement, which for all the artistry of the outline unfolds with no apparent end in view. The five-part Overture in G minor, with which the second side of our record begins, is probably also an early work. The Allegro section, rather like that in the D minor Overture, is built up as a canzona from several fugal motifs; the closing Adagio, despite its shortness, lays powerful emphasis on the end by means of strongly chromatic harnionic movement above two pedal-points - here, as everywhere in the young Purcell’s works, it is above all the harmony whose boldness and dark, characteristically mournfully-tinted magnificence of colour leaves far behind it all the conventions of the forms he had taken over, and presses forward to the most personal expression. Somewhat lighter than the large ensemble pieces is the small F minor Suite for harpsichord, composed in 1689, in whose three terse movements are mirrored the playing techniques of the earlier virginalists, as is also their fondness for sublimating folk-music elements (to be found here in the spirited Hornpipe). The four-part Pavane in G minor unfolds like the A minor Payane, into a concise ternary form, but with an even more subtly contrapuntal art and even greater intensity of expression. Sefauchi’s Farewell is an elegiac little Menuett in D minor, which was in all probability written for the departure from England (in 1688) of the celebrated castrato Giovanni Francesco Grossi, who had received the nickname “Siface”. More impressive, in comparison with this harmless but delicate miniature, is the New Ground in E minor, the arrangement made in 1689 of an aria from probably the first Ode to St. Cecilia by Purcell, Welcome to all the pleasures (1683). Over the “ground”, a threebar chromatic cadence in changing guise, an elegant melody develops in the upper parts, alternating between cantabile and ornamental sections. Here, within a small framework and with more modest means, he moulds and balances the art of constructing his movements with elegance of form and subtlety of expression, as in the great D major Chaconne. Finally, the A minor trio-sonata is an example of the sovereignty with which Purcell adopted the representative form of the “modern” Italian chamber music of his time. The work is the third of the posthumous collection of sonatas of 1697, but was perhaps written very much earlier, at the time of the first trio-sonatas (around 1683); Roger North’s judgment of Purcell’s trio-sonatas confirms it fully as “clog’d with somewhat of an English vein”, but yet, and for that very reason, “very artificiall and good Musick”. The form of the work still corresponds exactly to that of the early Italian sonata: a canzona-like series of short sections, of which only the last has a pronounced dance character. “Somewhat of an English, vein” is nevertheless easy to recognise: in the harmonic intensity of the first Grave and of the third section; in the connection of a delicate cantabile quality tinged with a little melancholy and subtlety of construction, in the second section (Largo, 3/4); in the strict counterpoint of the “canzona” and even of the closing Gigue with its combinations and inversions of themes, which, as in the glorious period of consort music, are quite obviously moulded spontaneously into a harmonically rich and naturally flowing style of writing; finally in the cadence of the Grave with its chromatic intensification so typical of Purcell’s construction at the end of a movement. This sonata too, like nearly all of Purcell’s instrumental music, is “very artificiall” - but like everything that the “Orpheus Britannicus” wrote, it is also “very good Musick”. ···················· Henry Purcell’s Instrumental Music In the composition of the Orpheus Britannicus the instrumental music, in quantity, is of almost negligibly small importance compared with the sacred and secular vocal works, yet in quality occupies a place which is all the more significant. The composer’s position between epochs, his intimate contact with the English tradition along with his resistance to new influences penetrating from the Continent, his historical key position as the successor of the Golden Age of English music, and yet his solitary greatness - nowhere can these be more clearly seen than in the handful of purely instrumental compositions, which mainly belong to his earliest creative years: in the three- and four-part fantasias for consort of viols without continuo, in which the 21-year-old Purcell took his leave in 1680 of the great tradition of English consort music; in the trio sonatas published three years later, in which the new style of the Italian sonata with continuo had already, to a large extent, supplanted the polyphonic consort technique; in the small occasional pieces for harpsichord, which brought back to life, transformed, the great artistry of the virginalists; and in the overtures, suites and single dance movements for strings, which form the link between consort music and the great stage music of later years. Purcell’s youth coincided with the early years of the Restoration, and his creative years until his all too early death in 1695 at the age of 36 with the full blossoming of London’s metropolitan and court musical life under Charles II (1660-85), James II (1685-89) and William III (1689-1702). The Golden Age of English music, with its extensive yet fastidiously refined musical culture of court, nobility and land-owning middle-class had foundered in the chaos of civil war; the short but intensive blooming of instrumental ensemble music for consort, of the art of virginals-playing and of the lute-song did not survive the economic crisis of the twenty years of the civil war and Cromwell’s Commonwealth. When Charles II and his court society were re-established in 1660, the scene in England had changed irrevocably, and the predilections which the new trend-setting society of immigrants brought with them made a simple link with the musical traditions of the Golden Age impossible in any social restoration. The place of a widespread musical culture, judged to be sound and upheld by a broad range of musicians, was taken on the one hand by music as a social and court manifestation after the model of Versailles, and on the other (on which modern, i. e. fashionable musical life increasingly concentrated) by music as an entertainment for the general public of the metropolis of London, musically no longer very fastidious, and scarcely conscious of tradition. The place of the indigenous, serious and phlegmatic polyphony of consort music was taken by the new and simpler Italian sonata, melodically and harmonically more obvious; that of the lute-song, subtle both in text and in music, by the popular dance-song and sociable song; and the place of music-making by small circles of connoisseurs and music-lovers was increasingly taken by public concerts given by professionals and travelling virtuosi - mostly from Italy - and by musico-dramatic stage performances intended for a wide public to enjoy, preferably merely passively. In these circumstances Purcell’s consort fantasias of 1680 were really already an anachronism. This exercise in writing by a rising musician was in an idiom which the public had long regarded as antiquated - it is significant that Purcell’s works were not printed during his lifetime, and that the autograph clearly shows how the composer finally dropped his original ambitious plan for a large collection of fantasias. But in fact even the small group of completed three- and four-part movements grew, in the hands of a genius, into a splendid culmination of a species, into the combination of the traditional strictly contrapuntal structure with a new, emotionally highly charged and harmonically bold musical language, which put in the shade even the greatest models from the beginning of the century. Directly after this “traditional” beginning, however, Purcell seems to have turned decisively to the fashionable and forward-looking instrumental forms of his time. In the trio sonatas published in 1683 and dedicated to Charles II (followed in 1697 by a second collection published by his widow) he had, in the words of the preface, “faithfully endeavour’d a just imitation of the most fam’d Italian Masters”. The strict art of the viol consort is still perceptible throughout these first “endeavours”, but from now on the Italian basso continuo and the Italian sound of the violin remain the bases of his instrumental composition - transformed, admittedly, into a highly personal idiom. Its wholly superficial elegance yet melodic intensity, complicated but vital rhythm and bold harmony are as impossible to mistake as the unique recasting of the Italian song style into a declamatory and vocal technique, developed entirely from the English language, which a little later begins to appear in his first big vocal works. Purcell never became “Italian” like so many of his lesser contemporaries and as the musical taste of the court he served would have urged. His greatness lies in the very fact that he remained “original”, that he did not make concessions to the musical tendencies of his time but converted them to suit himself. The fantasias and sonatas of 1680 and 1683 are documents of a spiritual biography, in which the greatest composer of his time and country came to terms with the past and present and expressed himself freely. Since it was a genius who in them trod this double path of development, they are at the same time valid works of art, to which clings nothing immature or primarily experimental, just as in the smaller instrumental works from the same or a later period, which he himself did not send to be printed, and of which the present record includes an important part. Ludwig Finscher (translated by Lionel Salter)