Henry Purcell: Complete Fantasies for Viols – Phantasm

Purcell’s youthful fantasies

In Henry Purcell´s youthful Fantasies, most of which he composed in the year 1680, the composer adds what was to be the final and most brilliant chapter in the history of the English viol fantasy. With its harmonic vagaries – which manage to shock and yet seem entirely inevitable – these amazing works find the 21-year old Purcell composing in a contemplative idiom that many would think better suited an old man, that is, turning to the most severe forms of imitative and invertible counterpoint as a highly speculative and experimental field for musical exploration.

The quartet Phantasm, a consort dedicated to music for viols from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, performs the complete Fantasies for Viols by Purcell on this album. The group has previously recorded music by Byrd, Gibbons, Mico, Marais and Couperin for BBC Radio 3 and has appeared in festivals in London, Stour, Amsterdam, Oslo and Skálhot, Iceland. The quality of their performance of Purcell´s Fantasies is impeccable, and it remains for us to imagine how relatively modest contrapuntal works for viol consort composed by a youthful Londoner in the early 1680s manage to scale such heights, a question that is sure to endure in appreciating these magnificent works.