CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE - Abeille Musique
CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE - Abeille Musique
CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE - Abeille Musique
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text whilst the choir sings the refrain words as accompaniment.<br />
The third king is introduced mysteriously but, out of<br />
the blue, Dove throws the music into an energetic scherzo<br />
as he describes the golden baubles and the excitement of<br />
the child’s response in receiving them. The piece ends in<br />
quiet reflection.<br />
Run, shepherds, run! is a completely different conception<br />
and underlines Dove’s preoccupation with and feel<br />
for drama and the dramatic. This was another Spitalfields<br />
Festival commission, this time celebrating the life of<br />
Christopher Robert Vaughan, who died in his late thirties.<br />
Vaughan was a local resident in Spitalfields and Patron<br />
of the Festival who left part of his estate to funding<br />
the Festival’s ‘Learning and Participation’ programme.<br />
(This was not the only work commissioned from Jonathan<br />
Dove in memory of Vaughan as he was also asked to<br />
write a community cantata On Spital Fields to celebrate<br />
Vaughan’s life.) The poem—‘The Angel’s Song’ by William<br />
Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), from a collection<br />
called Flowers of Sion—is energetic and ideal for<br />
Dove’s purposes. The music was written to be performed<br />
with audience participation and they need to be taught<br />
their ‘refrain’ before the performance. In fact the music is<br />
quite complex as the audience part is divided up as the<br />
piece progresses, first into two parts and then into four<br />
parts, all of whom sing with a section of the choir. As Dove<br />
writes in his preface: ‘The four-part division presents the<br />
audience with quite a challenge: it may result in a degree<br />
of happy chaos, but this is all part of the fun.’ Wells<br />
Cathedral Choir take no such risks on this recording; the<br />
highly trained Wells Cathedral School Chapel Choir act as<br />
the ‘audience’ and all is well!<br />
The main theme that runs throughout is also taken by<br />
the audience. Dove treats it in a number of different ways<br />
and, imaginatively (and helpfully), before the audience’s<br />
first entries their phrases are sung strongly by the choir,<br />
5<br />
which they then imitate. The model for much of this piece<br />
is Britten’s A Boy was Born in which he has a constantly<br />
repeated energetic figure passed around the vocal parts<br />
over which is sung a binding longer-note melody (sung by<br />
the boys’ choir in Britten’s case). The result is very exciting<br />
and strongly energized.<br />
Ralph Allwood is well known for his influential summer<br />
choral courses at Eton College. He commissioned Dove to<br />
write an anthem for the 1997 course at Eton and Dove<br />
responded with Ecce beatam lucem, a setting of words<br />
which, in a prefatory note, Dove says were possibly written<br />
by Alessandro Striggio (1540–1592). Striggio wrote a fortypart<br />
motet setting these words which is often coupled with<br />
the more famous one by Tallis. It is an ecstatic poem in<br />
praise of light and its source from the sun, the moon and<br />
the stars which are all created by God. The music is<br />
underpinned by a series of fast-moving and constantly<br />
repeated keyboard figures on the organ as the choir moves<br />
between slower-moving lyrical phrases and quickly<br />
imitative figures thrown from voice to voice. The final<br />
section (‘O mel et dulce nectar’), in a slower, reflective<br />
mood, leads to the final beautiful bars, which Dove marks<br />
to be ‘slow and serene.’<br />
In beauty may I walk was composed as a leaving<br />
present for Anthony Whitworth Jones, a great supporter of<br />
Dove’s who commissioned him to compose numerous<br />
works for the Glyndebourne Festival including the opera<br />
Flight, on his departure from Glyndebourne in August<br />
1998. This is a short and simple setting of anonymous<br />
words from the Navajo translated by the American poet<br />
Jerome K Rothenberg, who made a remarkable job of the<br />
almost untranslatable. The Navajo is a huge tribe of North<br />
American Indians whose reservation (mostly in Arizona) is<br />
the largest in the United States. The Navajos have never<br />
stopped speaking their native Athabaskan language which<br />
is spoken only on the Navajo reservation. Until recently it