Jonathan Dove wrote his oratorio, There Was a Child, in memory of the son of friends who had died at the age of 19. At the parents' request, the work is celebratory and dwells only briefly on the tragedy of the loss. Dove assembled a widely diverse selection of poems, including works by poets as varied as Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickenson, Tennyson, Whitman, and Langston Hughes, as well as lesser known Renaissance and modern writers. Dove is skillful at setting texts and gifted in conveying the poetry's sense in ...
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Jonathan Dove wrote his oratorio, There Was a Child, in memory of the son of friends who had died at the age of 19. At the parents' request, the work is celebratory and dwells only briefly on the tragedy of the loss. Dove assembled a widely diverse selection of poems, including works by poets as varied as Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickenson, Tennyson, Whitman, and Langston Hughes, as well as lesser known Renaissance and modern writers. Dove is skillful at setting texts and gifted in conveying the poetry's sense in expressive musical gestures. His style is generously lyrical, and for the most part he avoids the kinds of harmonic choral clichés that frequently characterize the works of his contemporaries who use a similarly conservative musical language. His orchestration is especially fine, and he is a master of creating shimmering, luminous textures. The influence of John Adams (from the era of Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer) is often evident in the shape of the vocal lines, the...
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