Purcell: Dioclesian
Soloists
English Baroque Soloists
John Eliot Gardiner
After the discussion of the links between English and French music in opera 47 it was inevitable that I would cross back over the channel and taken in some Purcell. I know Dido, King Arthur and The Fairy Queen reasonably well but I don't think that I have head any of Dioclesian before.
Purcell's operas (other than Dido) present real problems in performance. They are usually termed semi-operas because the main characters are spoken roles and the music is largely for minor characters, dancing, interludes and choruses. Performances with the complete spoken text would be virtually impossible today. At the other extreme the performance of King Arthur I saw in London some years ago dispensed with dialogue completely and simply presented the music as as series of largely unrelated tableau.
It is of course the music that keeps these pieces alive. While I didn't think that there was anything in Dioclesian which quite matched the supreme moments in the other three works I have mentioned (but then, what does?) there was still some very attractive music here. Perhaps it took a while to get going - some of the early music was a little perfunctory in places but as it progressed there was some really impressive material here, including in particularly some of the music for the soprano soloists. There is also a bit of the 'hey-noon-no' about some of the opera (nothing wrong with that of course) as well as moment of rare beauty. Purcell's ability to set English words is incomparable - but as I said in opera 47 there are also moments when one could swear that the music was written by a Frenchman!
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