A chat with Tempesta di Mare Founder and Recorder Virtuoso Gwyn Roberts:
Where did you get the inspiration for this recital? Is there a connection to last year’s Art of the Fugue recital on four recorders?
The Purcell Fantazias (that’s how he spelled it!) share some interesting features with Bach’s Art of the Fugue: both are sets of music written by a brilliant composer in a form that had gone out of fashion decades earlier, and both survive in score form rather than separate part books for the four performers, without any indication of what instruments the composer intended. But there are also wonderful differences. Fugues are rigorous compositions full of rules, while the idea of a Fantazia is explicitly free. Purcell infuses these pieces with variety and invention. There are cheerful sections and somber sections, crunchy dissonances and sweet sonorities, flights of virtuosity and chorale-like meditative moments.
After the great pleasure we four recorder players had playing Art of the Fugue together last year, we named our group New World Recorders and decided to make this an ongoing enterprise. The Purcell Fantazias is a natural fit for our next project together.
Any stories you can share from your research about the works being performed?
Henry Purcell wrote his nine four part Fantazies in the summer of 1680 when he was 20 years old. He dated each one. He wrote seven of them between June 10 and June 30, and the other two on August 19 and 31. We have no idea why this forward-looking young composer, who had written his first Ode for the King’s Birthday when he was just 11 years old and was otherwise mostly focused on grand works for chorus and orchestra for the court and the stage, suddenly decided to pump out a series of small-ensemble pieces in an old-fashioned form, nor why he stopped for six weeks in the middle of the process. Were they written for a particular occasion or a particular group of people? Did he hear some fantasias by another composer — perhaps Matthew Locke or Henry Lawes, whose music we will play later this year — and get inspired? Or was he trying to train himself in the art of counterpoint? Nobody knows for sure.
We know these works were not originally composed for recorder, but you have adapted it to those instruments. What is that process like? Why did you choose to do it this way?
We don’t know that for sure, actually. Purcell didn’t specify any particular instruments, and the ranges of the parts are unconventional for a consort of viols. Perhaps he intended them for members of the violin family, or for a mixed ensemble of various instruments. Or perhaps he was more interested in just writing and exploring the possibilities of the form, without thinking of having them performed by anyone at all. This last idea is suggested by the fact that only scores survive, rather than part books, and it would have been difficult for a quartet of any sort of stringed instruments to read from just a single score together, squinting to see the small notes and turning pages as necessary while bowing.
I do think that the intertwined nature of the music works best on a set of similar instruments, so why not play them on recorders? Recorders were enormously popular in England at the time, right alongside viols. All we have to do in order to play the Fantazias on recorders is take some notes up or down an octave so that they fit in our range — a common practice then and now.
In any case, a quartet of recorder players would have had a much easier time crowding around that one score and reading the music together than any group of string players, whose bows and movements force them to sit much farther apart when they play. So maybe they really are for recorders after all!