Fantasia No.5 in 4 parts Z.736

Fantasia No.3 in 3 parts Z.734

The English fantasia for viols – as practiced by such outstanding composers as Byrd, Gibbons, Lawes, Jenkins and Locke – was for well over 100 years the most serious form of chamber music before the evolution of the classical string quartet. Purcell’s contribution to the form came at the very end of its development, when demand for instrumental fantasias had dwindled to such an extent that none was published after Matthew Locke’s Consort in Four Parts in 1660. So what inspired Purcell nine or ten years after that to devote himself so comprehensively to an all but obsolete form (completing three Fantasias in three parts, nine in four parts, the Fantasia on one note in five parts, two In Nomines in six and seven parts respectively) it is difficult to imagine. Perhaps it was in an effort to revive the form or, more likely, in response to a self-imposed technical challenge – in much the same spirit, perhaps, as that in which Bach was to write his Art of Fugue. Certainly, Purcell demonstrates no less contrapuntal skill here than even Bach at his best. The major difference is structural: whereas Bach’s fugues and canons form an unbroken continuity, Purcell’s Fantasias clearly fall into sections each with its own material, the transition between them often marked by a change of tempo.

Fantasia No.5 in B flat (in four parts) opens with a chromatically harmonised, exquisitely dissonant prelude, includes at its centre a comparatively lively episode of imitative counterpoint on the theme introduced (in this version) by viola and ends with a section based on the two ideas presented simultaneously by the two violins. Written perhaps a year earlier, Fantasia No.3 in G minor (in three parts) falls into two main sections, the first a measured treatment of the three-bar theme offered by violin, the a second modestly brisk but ingenious display of contrapuntal devices, inversion prominent among them.