About the album

While Jonathan Dove is best known for his 25 operas and his commitment to community and children’s music, including some very large scale statements, his considerable output of songs show a very different side to his musical persona. Most of these songs were written to commemorate events, friends or people, and several had private first performances with the composer at the piano. Dove’s experience as a dramatic composer is shown by his masterful shaping of sequences of poems. Each of the song-cycles recorded here is a well-balanced organism, and there is only one stand-alone song on this CD. It goes without saying that his setting of and response to the poems set is nonpareil.