Restoring King Arthur

The Gabrieli Consort and Players built its reputation on disc through the reconstruction or, at least, the re-imagining of liturgical events, contextualising Renaissance and early-Baroque sacred music. In recent years, this authority has been more subtly expressed on the covers of their recordings; thus Handel L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato 1740 or Haydn The Seasons 1801. The implication remains the same; the audience is being sold a particular and, in their mind, definitive instance of the work. Early drafts of the cover art for forthcoming recordings of Purcell King Arthur and Fairy Queen suggest a similar approach. Recording these Restoration operas, however, required a different editorial and interpretative process and the resultant recordings are more complex works than the titling implies.

This process, stimulated by the reduction from stage to disc and from the ephemeral sources - could an ur-King Arthur ever have existed as a notated work? - required a re-evaluation of intention, the interpretation being explicitly formed via a network of relationships between new scholarly and performative work and twenty years of performing tradition within the Gabrielis. In this paper, the author, who both edited the music and performed in the string band, evaluates the tensions inherit in this process and examines some of the new readings of sources that emerged from the project. He concludes that the experience of recording these operas offers the prospect of a more honest dialogue between historical performance, its practitioners, and audience.