When the award-winning composer, Gabriel Jackson, agreed to write The John Armitage Memorial (JAM)’s annual commission, ideas started to fly. Butterfly wings, 18th-century odes and time fluttered into the piece…
The idea behind the piece is for it to be in two parts (the wings) straddling a concert interval, with the interval appearing as the body of the butterfly. The premieres of the first and second “wings” will also be separated by eight months.
Jackson has set Joseph Addison’s well-loved ode, The Spacious Firmament, for the first part of the double commission. This will be premiered on 10th April at St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street by the BBC Singers, Onyx Brass and Stephen Disley, under Nicholas Cleobury. The second part, a contemporary reflection of the Ode, will be premiered in December, at a retrospective concert to mark the ten-year anniversary of John Armitage’s death, in 1998.
Jackson is excited, "The Spacious Firmament is full of vivid imagery which invites the kind of kaleidoscope of textures and colours a choir, brass quintet and organ affords. Akin to the large-scale motets of 17th-century Venice, the piece is built from antiphonies of variegated scoring - fanfaring trumpets...a hushed choral chant over deep organ pedals...dancing chorales for the brass... brazen, clanging tuttis...a whooping horn...glistening, corruscating organ figuration...all seeking to give vibrant voice to Addison's celestial, ecstatic vision."