Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Eccles: Semele; Purcell: Dido and Aeneas

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

You could call this Sunday's presentation "Purcell's Last Gasp." John Eccles (1668-1735) was of the generation of musicians circulating in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Eccles began his career as a composer around the time of the untimely death of Henry Purcell, the much-praised "English Orpheus," in 1695. He was one of the up-and-coming rivals of Purcell in writing music for the theater, and his music is in the same insular style of the English baroque of the Restoration period. Eccles composed at least a dozen masques in this style before his Semele (1705-06?). He collaborated, as did Purcell, with William Congreve, the greatest poet of the age. Handel would set the same Semele text to music in 1744. (I have presented Handel's Semele three times on this program.)

Eccles's Semele was intended to be the grand opening production at the newly-built Queen's theatre in the Haymarket. We don't know exactly why Semele was naver staged there, however, and Eccles's score was shelved. By 1705, Italian opera in the advanced continental baroque style was already sweeping the old style out of London. Handel would shortly begin producing his own Italian opere serie at the Haymarket.

The autograph score of Eccles's Semele: An Opera has survived almost complete. An overture from one of Eccles's other stageworks has been supplied for the world premiere recording of the work by the period instrument Academy of Ancient Music, with thirteen voices, directed by Julian Perkins. AAM, the proprietary label of the orchestra, issued Semele on two CDs in a deluxe package in 2020. Reviewer Bertil Van Boer enthuses, "This is an excellent recording... If one wishes to find a composer to bridge the gap between Purcell and Handel in terms of importance, one need not look further than this work." (Fanfare, November/December, 2021.) Since Semele is an extension of the Purcellian style, it begs comparison with Dido and Aeneas, a historically-informed recording of which you will hear immediately following.