Henry Purcell (1659 – 1695) was an English composer.
His style of Baroque music was uniquely English,
although it incorporated Italian and French elements.
Generally considered among the greatest English opera
composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple
and William Byrd as England's most important early
music composers. No later native-born English composer
approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan
Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin
Britten in the 20th c...(+)
Henry Purcell (1659 – 1695) was an English composer.
His style of Baroque music was uniquely English,
although it incorporated Italian and French elements.
Generally considered among the greatest English opera
composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple
and William Byrd as England's most important early
music composers. No later native-born English composer
approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan
Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin
Britten in the 20th century.
For his 1694 offering to the Queen, Come ye sons of
Art, away, Purcell was on sparkling form, and produced
an Ode markedly different to the majority of the
twenty-two works which had preceded it. The forces
utilized were greater than normal, with an orchestra
replacing the more usual single strings, and there was
a clearly defined role for the chorus. Recent successes
on the stage had led to this more expansive style of
composition, and the inspired text (probably by Nahum
Tate), full of references to music and musical
instruments, was one which gave Purcell’s fertile
imagination plenty of source material.
The overture (re-used the following year in The Indian
Queen) begins in stately fashion, its opening ten bars
full of glorious harmony, and the lively canzona which
follows is full of rhythmic ingenuity amongst its three
contrasting motifs. But it is in the wistful adagio
section that Purcell is at his finest: the sighing
motifs and poignant harmonies are full of pathos, and
the use of sustained notes, which cut through the
middle and bass of the texture, is quite extraordinary.
Rather than the expected repeat of the canzona, we are
immediately led into the opening chorus, and the first
of several repetitions of the main theme in various
harmonizations and arrangements—a technique taken
straight from the theatre. With the tune taken first by
a countertenor, Purcell cleverly solves the problem of
re-scoring for the chorus (where the tune would have
either been too low or far too high for the sopranos)
by providing them with a descant and retaining the tune
in the altos, doubled by the trumpet and oboe. In the
famous duet ‘Sound the trumpet’ Purcell resisted
the temptation to use the actual named instruments,
choosing instead an insistently lively two-bar
modulating ground bass over which two countertenors
demonstrate their virtuosity and giving the royal
continuo players splendidly characterful lines. There
would have been wry smiles in the orchestra at ‘You
make the list’ning shores resound’, for two of the
instrumentalists sitting in the band would have been
the famous trumpeters Matthias and William Shore.
The only complete source material for Come ye sons of
Art is a copy by Robert Pindar, dating from 1765, and
contains several dubious pieces of scoring which this
performance corrects. Purcell scored his overture for
one trumpet and one oboe, though in subsequent
movements he uses a pair of each. Some modern editors
have added an editorial part for a second trumpet
(often ignoring the fact that Purcell’s trumpets
could play very few notes in their lower registers) and
doubled oboes on these lines. Purcell’s intentions
appear to have been different, and in the overture we
return to his scoring which gave Shore’s remarkable
trumpet playing the top line, and the oboe, in its
richest register, the second part. Pindar’s
manuscript also contains a timpani part in the final
chorus, wildly ornamented and out of keeping with other
timpani parts of the era. For the opening chorus there
is little possibility that the instruments could have
been used, for the music moves too far away from the
tonic and dominant. But in the last chorus ‘See
Nature, rejoicing’ the music is of a different
character, tonally more stable, and it is hard not to
imagine a timpani part. After all the repetitions of
the music in the duet that precedes the chorus, a
timpanist could easily have improvised his line.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Purcell).
Although originally composed for Voices (SSATB) & Basso
Continuo, I created this interpretation of the "Come ye
sons of Art, away" from "Come ye sons of Art, away"
(Z.323 No. 2) for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French Horn &
Bassoon) & Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).
