Purcell, Henry: Three Occasional Odes

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PURCELL SOCIETY EDITION

Stainer & Bell are pleased to announce that they are now the publishers to the Purcell Society and will be publishing all new volumes in the Purcell Society Edition and the Purcell Society Edition Companion Series.

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Most Recent Volumes:
PE29 Sacred Anthems, Part V - Continuo Anthems, Part II - November 2011
PE21 Purcell: Dramatic Music, Part III - December 2010
PE12 Purcell: The Fairy Queen - March 2010
PE1 Purcell: Three Occasional Odes - October 2008
PE27 Purcell: Symphony Songs - February 2008
Next Volume:
PE23 Services - Publication 2012

Volume 1 - Three Occasional Odes
Edited Bruce Wood

In addition to Celestial music and Great Parent, hail!, formerly in Miscellaneous Odes and Cantatas which is now replaced by PE27 Symphony Songs, PE1 contains The Yorkshire Feast Song, Of old, when heroes thought it base, which was the inaugural volume of the series, published in 1878 and edited by a founder-member of the society, W. H. Cummings. The first English score with full Baroque instrumentation, including trumpets and oboes, it is a consummate display of orchestral mastery, and represents the composer’s first response to Giovanni Battista Draghi’s 1687 setting of Dryden's Cecilian Ode From Harmony. Performing material is in preparation.
Hardback

Volume 12 - The Fairy Queen
Edited Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock

Presented in a highly praised new production by Glyndebourne Opera in 2009, this edition of Purcell's third semi-opera, The Fairy Queen, offers a new and definitive version of words and music prepared by two leading scholars in the field. The playtext, anonymously adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, is printed in full, and the role of the various sources, and the relationship of the manuscript theatre score to the printed word-books of 1692 and 1693, are thoroughly reappraised. The other sources include music manuscripts which have not previously been examined, and which prove to have a significant bearing on the musical text. Full account is taken of the varied instrumental resources and conventions accessible to the Restoration composer, reflected in the multi-purpose performing material for the edition which is available for rental (HL390).
Hardback

Volume 21 - Dramatic Music III
Edited Margaret Laurie

Vocal and Instrumental Music for the Stage, Part III

Purcell began writing for the stage in 1680. His work for the two London theatre companies (which merged in 1682, but which in 1695 split once more into two competing factions) constituted an increasingly important aspect of his creative activities in the late 1680s, and became exceptionally fruitful in the last six years of his life, encompassing not merely his four great dramatic operas but also a prodigious quantity of music for more modest stage pieces.

The productions for which the music is included in this volume are: Oedipus (1692), Oroonoko (1695), Pausanias (1696), Regulus (1692), Rule a wife and have a wife (1693), Sir Anthony Love (1690), Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681), Sophonisba (?1685), The Old Batchelour (1693), The Richmond Heiress (1693), The Rival Sisters (1695), The Spanish Fryar (1695), The Tempest (1695), The Virtuous Wife (1695), The Wives Excuse (1691), Theodosius (1680), and Tyrannick Love (1694).

The original Purcell Society edition of this volume, edited by Alan Gray and published in 1917, has long been out of print. This comprehensive new edition – the only one available of most of the music – is based on a fresh examination of all the surviving materials, including newly discovered manuscript sources, carried out by one of the greatest living authorities on Purcell’s dramatic music.
Hardback

Volume 27 - Symphony Songs
Edited Bruce Wood

A collection of five cantatas and three vocal duets, plus In a deep vision's intellectual scene ('The Complaint') for two sopranos, bass and continuo, these nine symphony songs are similar in style and structure to their sacred counterparts, the symphony anthems, and include works to texts by Charles Howe, Abraham Cowley and Anon.
Hardback

Volume 29 - Sacred Music, Part V: Continuo Anthems II
Edited by Robert Thompson

This volume continues the reordering of the Society's edition of Purcell's anthems, under which all the large-scale verse anthems with strings will be found in Volumes 13 (in preparation) and 14 and 17 (already published); all the verse anthems with organ in Volumes 28 (in preparation) and 29; and the stile antico anthems and the Latin motets in Volume 32 (in preparation). All eleven pieces in the present volume were probably composed for the Chapel Royal, and all appear to belong to Purcell's later years. Four of them are explicitly dated – the earliest 1687 – in an authoritative source which was not available to previous editors of the music: a score-book in the hand of the celebrated bass singer John Gostling, whose cavernous low register Purcell exploited for its dramatic effect in some of his finest compositions for the Chapel.
Hardback

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