Henry Purcell

Services

Edited Margaret Laurie and Bruce Wood

Purcell's only setting of the Morning, Communion and Evening services of the Anglican rite, the Service in B flat major, includes the four principal and the four alternative canticles and psalms, the Responses to the Commandments, and the Creed. The style is 'full', though including numerous verse sections with kaleidoscopic changes of scoring, and the music is relatively straightforward, perhaps being intended for ordinary cathedral use rather than for the Chapel Royal. Its six canonic doxologies and four other canons were almost certainly intended to emulate those of Blow's G major Service, but are actually more complex, and are fine examples of the composer's contrapuntal skill, surpassing even that of his master. A setting of the Te Deum and Jubilate in Purcell's celebratory D major manner, with trumpets and strings (the first setting with orchestra by an English composer), was admired by his contemporaries and was the inspiration for similar pieces by Blow, Turner, Croft and Handel. Included in the appendix to the volume are the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G minor, attributed to Purcell though more probably by his brother Daniel.