PURCELL: Fantazias
London Baroque / Charles Medlam
BIS CD-1165 [71:55]
The summer of 1680—Purcell just twenty-one, already a formidable contrapuntist—produced one of those curious anomalies that musical history keeps throwing up. Here was England’s most gifted young composer writing elaborate viol fantasias when the form itself was already an antiquarian exercise, when French dance suites and Italian sonatas were the fashionable currency. The manuscript tells its own story: those blank pages with their unfulfilled titles, the unfinished thirteen-part fantasia fragment. Even genius recognizes a dead end.
Yet what music. What astonishing music.
London Baroque’s decision to perform these works on modern strings rather than viols might strike purists as heretical—and I confess I approached this disc with considerable skepticism. But Charles Medlam and his colleagues have thought through their instrumentation with real intelligence. Two violas instead of two violins in the four-part pieces: that’s crucial. It shifts the tonal center downward, darkens the palette in ways that approximate (though never quite duplicate) the burnished homogeneity of a viol consort.
The opening Fantasia a 3 in D minor announces their approach immediately. The attack is cleaner than you’d get from gut strings, the articulation more precise—some will miss that slightly veiled, reedy quality that viols provide. But listen to how Ingrid Seifert and Jean Paterson negotiate the serpentine imitations in the F major three-part fantasia: there’s genuine understanding here of Purcell’s contrapuntal architecture, the way these lines need to breathe independently while creating that seamless polyphonic fabric. The tempo feels right, unhurried but never static.
In the four-part works—the real heart of this collection—London Baroque achieves something remarkable. The G minor fantasia (the first of the set) gets a reading that balances structural clarity with emotional weight. When Purcell’s chromatic descents pile up in the E minor fantasia, creating those exquisite harmonic collisions, the modern instruments actually help: the pitch relationships emerge with crystalline transparency. You hear exactly what the young composer was doing, how he was pushing English polyphony toward its expressive limits.
The famous Chacony in G minor—that heartbreaking ground bass piece that transcends the fantasia form entirely—receives a interpretation of genuine eloquence. Medlam understands that the repeating bass pattern needs to anchor without dominating, that each variation must build from the previous one while maintaining its own character. The climax, when it arrives, feels inevitable rather than imposed. Only in the final measures does the ensemble’s vibrato become slightly intrusive; viols would have maintained that austere, modal quality more effectively.
But this is caviling. The real test of any Purcell fantasia recording is whether it can sustain interest across seventy-plus minutes of dense, uncompromising counterpoint. London Baroque passes that test handily. They vary their dynamics more than viol consorts typically do—whether that’s historically defensible I couldn’t say, but it works. The five-part “Upon One Note” fantasia, with its audacious sustained middle C, never sounds like the academic stunt it could become. The two In Nomines—those liturgical cantus firmus pieces reaching back to Taverner—are properly solemn without becoming soporific.
Recording quality from BIS is predictably outstanding: St. Martin’s Church in East Woodhay provides warmth without excessive resonance. You can hear the individual instruments clearly, follow each contrapuntal strand, yet the blend remains convincing. The balance occasionally favors the upper voices—in the seven-part In Nomine, the bass line could use more presence—but these are minor quibbles.
How does this compare to the viol versions? Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XX remain the benchmark for sheer timbral authenticity, that dark-hued sonority that feels utterly of Purcell’s world. Phantasm brings youthful intensity and impeccable tuning. But London Baroque offers something different: a demonstration that these extraordinary pieces can survive—even flourish—in translation. They make a persuasive case that Purcell’s counterpoint, his harmonic invention, his structural mastery transcend questions of instrumentation.
Whether Purcell would have approved… well, he never published these works, never heard most of them performed. They were private experiments, compositional studies that happened to achieve something close to perfection. That we have them at all feels like a gift.
This release honors that gift with intelligence, musicianship, and genuine affection. It won’t replace viol versions in the affections of early music specialists, nor should it. But for listeners who find viols an acquired taste, or who simply want to hear these miraculous pieces from a fresh angle, London Baroque provides a thoroughly satisfying alternative. The playing is first-rate, the interpretations thoughtful, the recorded sound exemplary.
More than that: this disc might actually win converts to music that remains scandalously neglected. If modern strings help twenty-first-century ears appreciate what Purcell achieved in that remarkable summer of 1680, so much the better. Great music can withstand such transformations. This music certainly can.
