CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE - Abeille Musique

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