Henry Purcell, John Holloway Ensemble

Henry Purcell wrote his fantazias for strings in 1680, when he was about twenty and the English consort fantasia was already an old form, about to give way to the sonata. They are among the most intricate pieces in the genre, full of canon, augmentation and themes run backwards, yet they rarely sound like exercises. On this album the English Baroque violinist John Holloway and his ensemble play the twelve fantazias in three and four parts. They use violin, two violas and cello, not the viols usually associated with this music.

The John Holloway Ensemble here is Holloway with the violists Monika Baer and Renate Steinmann and the cellist Martin Zeller. Holloway and his ensemble had previously recorded for ECM a programme built around John Dowland's Lachrimae pavans (ECM 2189). The Purcell sessions took place in March 2015 at Radiostudio DRS in Zürich, as an ECM and SRF 2 Kultur co-production, with Manfred Eicher producing and Stephan Schellmann as engineer. The album appeared only in September 2023. Holloway wrote the booklet essay himself, calling the set a possible "personal farewell to a kind of music".

The numbered sequence is not followed. The disc opens with Fantazia X and scatters the three-part works (I to III) among the four-part ones. Wolfram Goertz, in the Rheinische Post, pointed to the hissing semiquavers of Fantazia VII, the dry-eyed sighs of Fantazia I and the strange harmonies of Fantazia IV. The players do not try to imitate the even blend of a viol consort. Holloway adds a little vibrato to some top lines, and the dance-like codas come out with a light, courtly lift. The writing moves between dense counterpoint and sudden chromatic darkness, at times resolved by a single unexpected chord.

Peter Quantrill wrote in The Strad that both the string sound and the new order take some adjustment, "but in both cases the experience is instructive and illuminating". On AllMusic James Manheim noted "contrapuntal artifice that Bach would have admired" and wondered why the recording waited eight years for release. Sabine Weber gave the album five stars in Fono Forum, and Anne E. Johnson, writing for Classical Voice America in December 2023, praised the ensemble's energy and clarity.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2249, first released on 22 September 2023.