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Henry Purcell: Composers
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The English composer and organist Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was the only great figure of English opera until recent times. In all his works he achieved a happy merger of English traditional styles with the new baroque principles from Italy.
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Henry Purcell is considered England's greatest composer of the Baroque period (1600-1749). Purcell was born in St Ann's Lane, Old Pye Street, in London on September 10, 1659 and died there on November 21, 1695.
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When this recording of Purcell's Airs and Duets first appeared in the late seventies it touched off a fire-storm of interest in one of England's greatest composers. This Purcell disc won world-wide recognition for American countertenor, Jeffrey Dooley, the young protégé of Alfred Deller. Now digitally remastered, this recording celebrates the return of this gifted artist together with internationally acclaimed tenor Howard Crook. Countertenor Jeffrey Dooley, a protégé of the renowned British countertenor Alfred Deller, is launching his re-entry in to the performance arena with this Lyrichord release of Purcell's Airs and Duets. Jeffrey Dooley can be heard in works by Bach, Sch�tz and Purcell on the Well-Tempered, Nonesuch, and Newport Classic labels. The internationally known American-born tenor, Howard Crook, has been recognized as a specialist on Bach and the hautecontre roles of French baroque opera, which he has since performed throughout Europe.
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Preceding Purcell, John Blow and other anthem composers began to contrast the two groups of singers more. By the time Purcell began to compose for the church, a new style in anthems had emerged (Wienandt 148). Although Purcell did write six full anthems, those sung entirely by the chorus and reflective of earlier anthem style, he became increasingly more discontented with the "old formulas." Purcell began to develop further the newer style of verse anthems (Westrup 226; Van Tassel 115). In this anthem style, the role of the chorus is greatly reduced (Van Tassel 116) and the straightforward alternation between two halves of the choir which typified earlier anthems (Wienandt 143) is replaced by a complex structure mixing chorus and soloists. Purcell was not the first to compose anthems that complicated the interactions between chorus and soloists; the anthems of Pelham Humfrey, John Blow, Orlando Gibbons, and others ... demonstrate a similar complexity (Holland 113; New Harvard 42). However, Purcell’s work moves beyond these other anthems because of the further development of expressive solo passages and interactions within the group of soloists.
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Like other English composers of his era, Purcell was much influenced by French and Italian styles as well as by older English traditions. He is noted for strong, distinctive harmonies and for his exquisite sensitivity to the rhythms and stresses of the English language. The grand public style of his choral odes and other ceremonial works, such as the 1692 Ode for St. Cecilia's Day ("Hail, bright Cecilia") and the Te Deum and Jubilate, were certainly models for George Frideric Handel. Purcell challenges William Byrd, Edward Elgar, and Benjamin Britten for the claim of being considered the greatest of English composers.
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It is perhaps in his music for the theater that Purcell is most consistently excellent. During the latter part of his career he appears to have been the regular conductor at the theater in Dorset Gardens, and to have supplied all the pieces presented there with such incidental music as they required. So far as is known he wrote music for more than fifty plays; in some cases only a song or two. Only once did he write a real opera, a drama without spoken dialogue, sung from beginning to end, and that was the Dido and Æneas" already mentioned. It is, both in its strength and weakness, a good specimen of Purcell's dramatic music. A great deal of it is childishly helpless, and the music, so far as it expresses anything, only expresses the composer's entire inability to express anything at all.
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