Music For A While / Improvisations On Purcell

L'arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar

"• After the intoxicating heat of Mediterraneo, released in 2013, Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L’Arpeggiata now head to the cooler climes of England with Music for a While, an album based on the haunting, graceful and sometimes deeply moving music of Henry Purcell. • Often considered England’s greatest composer, Purcell (1659-1695) represents an especially good match for the aesthetic of L’Arpeggiata: he made frequent use of the ground bass, a repeated (ostinato) figure in the lower line – the most famous instance of this occurs in Dido’s lament ‘When I am laid in earth’, the closing number from his opera Dido and Aeneas. The ground bass provides an ideal foundation for the brilliant, sometimes jazz-like improvisation that is the stock-in-trade of the L’Arpeggiata, here comprising singers, (plucked) strings, wind instruments, keyboard and percussion. • The contemporary element in Music for a While (named after a song written for John Dryden’s play Oedipus) is exemplified by the contribution, on acoustic and electric guitar, of Austrian jazz-player Wolfgang Muthspiel, while the Baroque tradition is embodied in the celebrated French countertenor Dominique Visse, a singer who set an example for Philippe Jaroussky. • In 2014, Music for a While will be presented at concerts in Rome, Paris, Grenoble, Berlin, Ludwigsburg and London. • “Perhaps the best bits of any L’Arpeggiata concert are the improvisations. Laying down a ground bass (a riff by any other name) the group then take it in turns to step forward for jazz-style breaks. Jazz might have come down to us via Africa but I defy anyone to hear a Purcell or Monteverdi ground and not trace the natural genealogy. Pluhar here makes her case effortlessly as we marvel at plucked bass and drums or – most impressive – a percussion solo for the finest wizard of percussion David Mayoral, giving us a single skin that can shriek, cry or sing according to the strokings of his fingers.” - The Arts Desk"

Price: $19.98