The Purcell Quartet
celebrated twenty years of music making with friends and collaborators at the Wigmore Hall in 2004. The group has appeared all over the world, including North and South America and all the countries of Europe, and for over ten years has been a regular visitor to Japan, touring extensively with fully staged performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and Orfeo. The Quartet has played at most of the major festivals in the United Kingdom, recorded extensively for the BBC, and toured with the Early Music Network. Recently, the members have concentrated on the works of J.S. Bach and Dietrich Buxtehude. They have presented several sell-out Wigmore Hall recitals of the early cantatas of Bach and then recorded these works for Chandos. They are also popularising the cantatas of Buxtehude with concerts and recordings involving their fabulous quartet of soloists – Emma Kirkby, Michael Chance, Charles Daniels and Peter Harvey. The Purcell Quartet has recorded a huge range of music exclusively for Chandos, including works by Purcell, Corelli, Lawes, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Weckmann, Buxtehude, Leclair, Schütz, Couperin and Biber, to outstanding critical and public acclaim.

Fretwork
Few other ensembles can match the range of Fretwork’s repertory, spanning as it does the first printed music of 1501 in Venice, to music commissioned by the group this year. Their recordings of arrangements of J. S. Bach have won particular praise, but they have recently issued a disc containing music by Grieg, Debussy, Shostakovitch, Warlock & Britten. This extraordinary breadth of music has taken them all over the world in the 25 years since their debut, and their recordings of the classic English viol repertory – Purcell, Gibbons, Lawes & Byrd – have become the benchmark by which others are judged. Their 2009 recording of the Purcell Fantazias won the Gramophone Award for Baroque Chamber Music.

The consistently high standards they have achieved have brought music old and new to audiences hitherto unfamiliar with the inspiring sound-world of the viol.