Chacony in G minor (after Purcell) (2011)

Arranging Chacony in G minor

Making a new arrangement of a great masterpiece by one of our greatest composers would be a daunting enough prospect even if one of our other greatest ever composers hadn’t already made a masterly arrangement of it of his own. Understandably, I approached this project with some trepidation.

The Chacony in G minor is a fiendishly intelligent and dense piece of composition. “The least frivolous of music, thought-erasingly complex and of such an inward looking nature as to have hardly ever been equalled.” says a comment on YouTube. Purcell, it seems to me, brings every ounce of his genius to bear on the problem of how to extend musical structure beyond the constraints of a seventeenth century dance form. The solutions he discovers are presented in the clearest, most direct way imaginable, and it’s hard to know what a new arrangement could possibly contribute further.

Britten’s approach to the problem was to treat the music with the utmost respect, staying close to the original material in creating a wonderfully simple arrangement that is a model of transparency and elegance. His version reminds us that, as well as being a great composer he was a brilliant interpretive musician. He scores the piece for a modern symphonic string section, with an expanded richness of palette, and, in so doing, adds a whole knew layer of emotional meaning. But the sound is also ‘modernised’ – fast-forwarded two- to three-hundred years as if by a director making a contemporary staging of a Baroque opera, and I began to wonder what would happen if I was to do the opposite and attempt to make it sound even older than it is.

I had a sonority in mind:  rustic woodwind, brass, and antique-sounding bells. Other ideas started to suggest themselves as I found clues hidden deep in Purcell’s counterpoint. Overlapping suspensions cause ‘pile-ups’ of dissonances and extraordinary ‘lemon juice’ chords that still shock the ear. The ground bass repeats over and over but somehow gives the illusion of constant variety and evolution. Games are being played within games, and I decided to shine a light on the beautiful treasures I’d found hidden inside the counterpoint. I think this music is robust enough to withstand the indignity of being peered at from a variety of different angles.

– Joby Talbot 11/07/11