CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE - Abeille Musique

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<strong>JONATHAN</strong> <strong>DOVE</strong> (b1959) is a hugely versatile composer who is perhaps best known for his remarkable canon of operas which range from the hugely successful comic opera Flight, based on a group of people trapped together in an airport for twenty-four hours, to works written especially for television, community operas and a series of works scored for period instruments. In an interview for Time Out in November 2009 he said: ‘I remember in my early teens reading The Hobbit and playing along with it on the piano, translating it into music … Around that time I also built model theatres of increasing sophistication—the last one used up all of my Meccano set and had ultraviolet lights and a hydraulic revolving stage.’ It is hardly surprising, then, if this instinct for the dramatic also informs his church music at every turn. He has written a great deal of choral music and the works selected for this recording show the range and versatility of his imagination and his response to varied texts. Nowhere is this clearer than in the work which opens this disc, Bless the Lord, O my soul, a setting of Psalm 104. It was commissioned by the Eton Old Choristers’ Association to celebrate the choristers’ part in the school’s life from its foundation by Henry VI in 1440 until the choir school’s closure in 1968. This piece is a paean of praise which is characterized by the opening flourishes on the organ and the outburst of joyful, canonic, wordless singing (to ‘Ah’) which forms the choir’s first entry. The music then moves backwards and forwards between the piano staccato chords which accompany the choir’s first line of text, more organ filigree work from the opening, and big forte chords with the choir’s wordless canon. The second section (‘who coverest thyself with light’) has the choir imitating the trebles’ first phrase in another extended canonic progression under which the organ develops the filigree figure from the start into a moto perpetuo. The 2 opening returns with what Dove has almost now made into a mantra of the first words ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul’. The final section increases in volume, intensity and excitement to bring the anthem to a dazzling conclusion. The Missa brevis is the most recent work to be recorded here and was commissioned by the Cathedral Organists’ Association for their conference in Wells Cathedral in May 2009 and first performed by the cathedral choir under Matthew Owens’s direction. There were various stipulations which Dove was required to address: the music should be challenging, but not be out of the reach of a good church choir; it should be interesting but accessible; it should be economical in its proportions; and it should be in Latin accompanied by organ. At the first performance it was immediately recognized that Dove had judged the work perfectly. (As stipulated by the commission, the composer had not published a liturgical Mass before.) Twenty-five cathedral organists signed up at the conference to perform the new work and many joined their number soon afterwards. The Kyrie is rather different from Dove’s normal practice. There is more linear development, more polyphony and a greater development to a moment of climax close to the end. The organ part is minimal and uses the sustained-chord device to bind the short vocal phrases together. The effective cluster chords and their formation are reminiscent of Kenneth Leighton’s organ writing. The Gloria is something of a moto perpetuo with the organ setting up a rhythmically dancing figure in the opening bars. The choir sings short phrases in a variety of dynamics which don’t let up on the rhythmic excitement until the words ‘Agnus Dei, Filius Patris. Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis’ allow the tension to relax even though the organ keeps up the constant motion underneath. A spectacular climax is reached at ‘Jesu Christe’ (at the words ‘Tu solus altissimus, Jesu Christe’), where Dove
illiantly throws the music into D flat major, from an A major tonality, after which the movement dances to a brilliant ending. The Sanctus & Benedictus carries on the dance in a ‘spirited’ setting. There are some similarities with Britten’s Missa brevis in the way the organ chords build up before the choral entry. However, where Britten leads straight into bell-like writing, Dove begins with a chordal outburst for the word ‘Sanctus’ and reserves his bell-like choral writing for the words ‘Dominus Deus Sabaoth’. The Hosanna at the end brings back the opening chords of the movement. The Agnus Dei is formed over an organ pedal point with a held low E and A which moves only twice during the movement, cleverly ratcheting up the tension with minimal fuss but maximum effect. After six bars of organ introduction (a short figure played by the right hand prepares us for the choral entry) the choir sings short chordal phrases. The introductory organ material is reduced to four bars for the next choral entry and the first pedal point move. After this the organ’s material is reduced further to two bars and the climactic pedal point shift to C and G with the choir singing the final ‘Agnus Dei’ strongly before subsiding into a mantra-like repetition of the words ‘dona nobis pacem’. It is a most beautiful and effective movement. One of the methods of development used by contemporary ‘minimalists’ is the use of a motif which is then repeated again and again with a ‘binding’ feature such as a melody leading it into different pitches and tonal areas. Contrast in these pieces is usually provided by the introduction of a different repeated motif in another mood and dynamic. This is the pattern for I am the day, an unaccompanied work setting a brief Advent text from Revelation chapter 22 describing the promise of the coming of Jesus. It was a Spitalfields Festival commission, first performed in December 1999 by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. The key elements are the stillness of 3 the opening bars, marked to be sung ‘with mystery’, and the following scherzo-like music which is ‘dancing and playful’. The second section maintains the melodic element of the first section sung by the basses while the upper voices sing short phrases taken from the Advent hymn O come, O come Emmanuel. This is highly effective as it acts almost like a distant memory of the hymn— something in the mind which one is trying to remember but, like a folk song learned in the cradle, the whole melody refuses to yield itself fully. The two contrasting elements return before a reflective ending has the trebles and altos gently wafting skywards like rising incense. Wellcome, all wonders in one sight! was written for South Wilts A Cappella (a choir from South Wilts Grammar School) to sing in Salisbury Cathedral. It is an unaccompanied setting of a section of an extended poem called ‘An Hymne of the Nativity, sung as by the shepherds’ by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw. This poem has a chorus of shepherds who encourage the two principal characters (also shepherds), Tityrus and Thyrsis, to tell what they saw at Christ’s birth. Dove uses a very small section of the chorus and part of a verse when both Tityrus and Thyrsis speak together (‘We saw thee in thy balmy nest’). Dove has written of Crashaw’s paradoxical imagery which spoke strongly to him: ‘Eternity shut up in a span. Summer in winter, day in night’, which, with remarkable economy, conveys the power of this miraculous event. Dove’s setting uses the constant repetition of the words ‘wellcome wonder’ as an accompanimental motif which rocks like the cradle and perhaps also suggests the hushed awe of the shepherds. Around this, first the trebles, then the first basses, and later still the tenors, sing the full text in beautifully lyrical lines which Dove instructs to be sung ‘with awe’. Coming to the end of the first section, which returns in the middle and near the end, Dove produces a
Page 1: CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE WELLS
Page 5 and 6: text whilst the choir sings the ref
Page 7 and 8: Bless the Lord, O my soul 1 Ah, Ble
Page 9 and 10: In a poor cottage inned, a virgin m
Page 11 and 12: MATTHEW OWENS is Organist and Maste
Page 13 and 14: en dessous, maintienne l’élan. U
Page 15 and 16: vit commander une autre œuvre, On
Page 17 and 18: CHORMUSIK VON Jonathan Dove JONATHA
Page 19 and 20: Crashaw aus dem 17. Jahrhundert. Da
Page 21 and 22: der Navajo-Indianer übertragen wur
Page 23 and 24: Recorded in The Cathedral Church of
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CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE - Abeille Musique

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