Henry Purcell: Fairest Isle (King Arthur), Anna Dennis with Voices of Music 4K UHD

The song “Fairest Isle,“ from Purcell’s semi-opera King Arthur (z628). Text by poet laureate John Dryden; music arranged and performed by the Early Music ensemble Voices of Music, with Anna Dennis, soprano. 4K ultra high definition video from the Great Poets concert, January, 2015 Purcell’s spare musical setting allows the text to be perfectly rendered as a dance with very simple melismas to highlight words and phrases. The text alternates lines of eight and seven syllables, with the first line of each pair ending on an unstressed syllable and the next line with a stressed syllable; in addition, the even numbered lines all rhyme together, and these all end with a quantitatively longer syllable (“prove“ or “grove“ as opposed to, for example, “let“ or “pit“); the use of longer syllables at the ends of these lines heightens the contrast to the unstressed syllables: this alternation of the structure of the poetic lines creates a kind of sway which goes