Hyperion Records

Let God arise is a very early work of Purcell’s, probably written before 1679 and copied, along with many other anthems, into a single manuscript (Fitzwilliam Museum MS 117) by B Isaack, a clerk of Eton College Chapel. The main bulk of the work is scored for two solo tenors who demonstrate Purcell’s colourful approach to word-setting in music of considerable originality.

The opening is splendid, with God’s enemies scattered in flurries of downward scales, and those ‘that hate him’ fleeing before him. Smoke marvellously ‘vanisheth’ at the lowest end of the two voices and wax sinuously ‘melteth at the fire’ as the ungodly perish: the chorus celebrate the joy of the righteous. ‘O God, when thou wentest forth’ leads to the most powerful section of the anthem; twice the earth shakes, the second time with an astonishing harmonic shift, and ‘the heavens dropped at the presence of God’. The concluding chorus ‘Even as Mount Sinai’ is highly angular in its melodic lines, venturing briefly into triple metre before sturdily reaching its conclusion.

from notes by Robert King ©