Jonathan Dove - Commissioned 2003
Jonathan Dove is best known as a composer of operas and choral music. His airport-comedy Flight ("one of the few successful comic operas of recent musical history" The Sunday Times) was premièred by Glyndebourne Touring Opera Company in 1998 and then performed at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1999. Since then it has toured internationally, meeting with an enthusiastic response from both audiences and music critics everywhere.
Dove has written a dozen operas, including Siren Song, L'Augellino Belverde, L'Altra Euridice, four large-scale community operas and a church opera, Tobias and the Angel. His television opera, When She Died..., was first broadcast in 2002 to an audience of nearly a million viewers in the UK alone.
L'altra Euridice is one of several works written for period instruments, including Figures in the Garden and The Middleham Jewel, both for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Köthener Messe, for the Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin.
Dove's choral music includes a song cycle, The Passing of the Year; the Bach-inspired Köthener Messe, and several anthems and carols, among them The Three Kings, commissioned by King's College Cambridge. His most recent choral work, commissioned by the John Armitage Memorial, is The Far Theatricals of Day, settings of Emily Dickinson for soprano, alto, tenor and bass soloists, choir, brass quintet and organ. Solo song-cycles include Five Am'rous Sighs, Ariel Songs and All You Who Sleep Tonight.
Instrumental works include two quartets (the string quartet, Out of Time and the saxophone quartet Tuning In), and three concertos - Stargazer, a trombone concerto for the London Symphony Orchestra; Moonlight Revels, for saxophone, trumpet and strings; and the Mozart-inspired flute concerto, The Magic Flute Dances. Recent commissions include an orchestral overture Run to the Edge, The Crocodiamond (or Rita and the Wolf) for narrator & orchestra, and a song cycle for Robert Tear, Out of Winter.
Coming from a family of architects, Dove's work has often been associated with buildings. He wrote music for the opening ceremonies of the Millennium Dome, the Millennium Bridge, and the Church of Christ Cornerstone, and provided the score for a film about the architect Carlo Scarpa. Film and architecture come together in one of his current projects, a work for the opening of The Sage in Gateshead (the new music-centre designed by Norman Foster) which will incorporate a film of the building-process.
The activity of building features in two of the three Community Operas he wrote for Glyndebourne, and also in The Palace in the Sky, a community opera produced at the Hackney Empire by English National Opera and Hackney Music Development Trust. Dove's commitment to working in the community is also shown in The Hackney Chronicles, an opera for primary school children. This year he begins work on a Community Cantata for the Spitalfields Festival.
Acknowledged as a highly-accomplished composer of theatre-music, Dove has written for the Royal National Theatre, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for the New York Shakespeare Festival. He has written scores for over thirty plays, and has been Music Adviser to the Almeida Theatre since 1990. Films include Venus Peter and Prague. In 1998 Dove was joint winner of the Christopher Whelen Award for his work in the fields of theatre music and opera. He is currently writing music for His Dark Materials, the National Theatre adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy.
Jonathan Dove is currently Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival and a Panel Member of the John Armitage Memorial.