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CD89714 Purcell and Dryden: A Professional Friendship

CD89714 Purcell and Dryden: A Professional Friendship
CD89714 Purcell and Dryden: A Professional Friendship
Item# CD89714
$12.95

Product Description

CD89714 Purcell and Dryden: A Professional Friendship

Thanks to pjr2007 at the box.bz

Purcell and Dryden: A Professional Friendship

Alyn Shipton explores John Dryden and Henry Purcell's collaboration on the semi-opera King Arthur, a work which is often regarded as the first professional collaboration between librettist and composer. He is joined by Purcell biographer Jonathan Keates, who describes some of the sights, sounds and smells of the world of Restoration theatre. It was a period in which people would come in and out for single acts of an opera, jostle in the stalls and swap seats in boxes, while the privileged would claim seats on the stage.

There is a look at the latest scholarship on the genesis of the opera, with Dryden's biographer, James Wynn, who traces the origins of the collaboration between the two men in the preface to Dioclesian, which was signed by Purcell but written by Dryden. He explains that 17th-century authorship was a bit like the teams of writers on a present-day sitcom.

Alyn also considers the origin of the Knights of the Garter, the redecoration of Windsor Castle and the messy politics of Jacobites supporting the ousted James II versus William III's Orange and Protestant sympathies. This provides the background to such remarkable musical treats as Purcell and Dryden's "Chorus of Cold People", the paean of praise to St George, and the best-known setting in the opera, "Fairest Isle". With naked sylphs, ancient British battles and a drinking song worthy of the terraces at an England game, Alyn sheds new light on this most fascinating of operas.

Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday, 5th September 2009

Media Type: MPEG 1.0 Layer III Audio: 192 kbps, 44 kHz (stereo) Length: 43min 55sec

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USA Telephone (404) 200-4776 We sell only opera recordings. The recordings are sent to you in paper sleeves with no tray card or inserts, just the raw discs with printed labels. These recordings are of nonprofessional quality that are in the public domain. The quality of these old opera recordings is not very good and they are meant for collectors and educational purposes only. Most of them are 30 or 40 years old, so they might be blurry, colors faded, and not sound very good, but they might not be available elsewhere. Please note that most of our recordings do not have tracks, they have 1 long track per disc.