Jonathan Dove’s In Damascus
Snape Maltings
It is wonderful to be in Aldeburgh, the home of Benjamin Britten, and the venue for his Aldeburgh Festival. We visited the Red House, where Britten and his partner Peter Pears lived, and the Snape Maltings, the concert hall where the Festival is based. I sang there with King’s College Choir many years ago.
Jonathan Dove
Last night there was a concert featuring a new piece by Jonathan Dove, who was in Hawaii last year for HOT’s production of his opera Siren Song. Jonathan’s new work is a wonderfully evocative song cycle for string quartet and tenor, performed by Mark Padmore, who was my roommate at King’s. He is now one of the leading English tenors in oratorio and recital repertoire, and his lyrical and authoritative performance was both impressive and deeply moving. The poetry is by the Syrian writer, Ali Safar, in a translation by Anne-Marie McManus, and Jonathan displays his extraordinary ability to set words to music, unleashing the bleak despair and real human grief of the Syrian civil war, while holding out the promise of future hope.
Mark Padmore
“I don’t think any nations in existence will match Syrians in their expressions of sadness, their airing of grief.”
In the first half of the concert there was a world premiere performance of another new song cycle by the young English composer, Jordan Hunt, for Soprano and Piano Trio. And the same forces also performed Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok. Soprano, Katherine Broderick, was ravishing in both works, especially Jordan Hunt’s emotional account of the death of his partner and subsequent isolation.
“Your shoulder to cry
Your anchor at sea
Your pinion to fly
Your atlas to be free.”
