One cannot begin to imagine the shock that English music lovers felt at the end of the war as they discovered Alfred Deller’s voice. The presence of a countertenor voice on the scene had been absent for over two centuries, with an extensive repertoire vanishing with it. Suddenly appearing from the past, this magical voice almost seemed unnatural. It was also that of an exceptional musician, of a natural expressiveness that knew how to touch the heart, always in the full repect of the text.
Alfred Deller’s talent would begin to reach an even wider audience from the end of the 1960s as the singer and his ensemble entered the musical catalogue of the label harmonia mundi. It was after a concert by the Deller Consort in Avignon in 1967 that Bernard Coutaz, the founder of the famous French label, suggested that he and Deller worked together. The two men connected straight away and their collaboration premiered shortly afterwards with a first recital dedicated to the madrigals and sacred works by Carlo Gesualdo. Deller’s purchase of an old farm in the Luberon would go on to further reinforce this friendship with the foundation of an academy for ancient music (one of the first in France) in the beautiful Sénanque Abbey and in Lacoste -- with the support of harmonia mundi. During the first part of his career, Alfred Deller is therefore able to record the major works of Purcell in the best acoustic and technical conditions, conducted and sung by himself.
At the age of 65, Alfred Deller gives his best performance in his final recordings, cut short by his sudden death as the result of a heart attack during one of the recordings, on the 16th of July 1979 in Bologna.
This famous Purcellian legacy is now published in a ‘collector’s edition’ box set of seven CDs or a luxurious version on five vinyls which are in limited edition and with five discs for the digital version. Qobuz is offering them to you in a Hi-Res Audio edition of brilliant auditive quality, under the generic title The Voice of Purcell, a favorite composer never left, to mark forty years since the loss of Alfred Deller. The original soundtracks have undergone a meticulous remastering process to restore the original takes to their entire splendour. Versions which revisit each of the original LPs are also available, also in Hi-Res. © François Hudry/Qobuz