“Many works have been composed during lockdown. This will surely survive as a sonorous record of the time: for the anxiety and dislocation of its first movement, the soaring, twittering birdsong of the second, and the serene, meditative melancholy of the last.”
(Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian, 27 November 2021)

Throughout his career, Jonathan Dove has nurtured various long-standing collaborations with diverse performers, ensembles, writers and institutions. There were a series of community projects for Glyndebourne, culminating in his calling-card opera Flight (1998), several operas for Musica nel Chiostro, Batignano, his periods as music advisor to the Almeida Theatre and his stewardship of the Spitalfields Music Festival (2001-6), each resulting in a series of works written with specific performers and groups in mind. A most significant recent relationship has blossomed with the Sacconi Quartet. Formed in 2001, they have commissioned his song-cycle with string quartet In Damascus—previously released on the Signum label—and his second string quartet On the streets and in the sky, and have Dove’s first string quartet Out of Time and the song-cycle recorded here Who wrote the Book of Love? in their repertoire. This extensive collaboration has led to an intense bout of string quartet creation (there are four altogether, the last two commissioned by other quartets) over the last few years.

String Quartet No 2 On the Streets and in the sky was written during the recent pandemic, that most disorienting and scary time. It was commissioned for the Sacconi Quartet to celebrate their 20th anniversary. Dove writes:

Lockdown in London in 2020 was a strange time. Days were filled with anxiety: ordinary daily chores such as a trip to the shops could be deadly. Yet at the same time, without traffic pollution or aeroplanes, the sky over London seemed exceptionally clear and blue. The birds seemed to sing more loudly—or perhaps it was that, without the sounds of traffic, we could hear them better. The blue sky and the birdsong contrasted strangely with the uneasiness of life on the ground. They seemed to offer glimpses of a better world.

This disconnect is vividly portrayed in this quartet, his first in almost twenty years. The mechanistic opening of the first movement is filled with foreboding, even violence, but instead of continuing in perpetual motion, the machine breaks down on occasion, fragmenting the argument. A beautiful contrast is accorded by a characteristically long-limbed viola line, which appears later in the movement, in an eerie passage where all momentum suddenly stops and the expressive line flowers tentatively. The movement ends with a whimper, the use of col legno, striking the string with the wood of the bow particularly bleak, though the string harmonics hint at a different mood to come.

With the second movement, we are in a different universe, greeted by a burst of birdsong, a tour de force of string writing, very high harmonics, approximate transcriptions of a robin in a nearby park, and a hidden bird, possibly a blackbird, in a tree outside the composer’s home. The calls are bound by a supple cello line, and are gradually quieted, as a sombre background of chords encroaches, instilling an elegiac mood. This continues without a break into the striking last movement, which slowly, innocent of any thematic material, and almost of pulse, ascends gradually to the heavens, culminating in a cautious radiance.

A close friendship proved the catalyst for Between friends, a memorial to Graeme Mitchison (1944-2018), a multi-disciplined scientist, intrepid adventurer, cyclist, paraglider, mountaineer and a possessor of two pianos on which he and Dove would play together for over forty years. Commissioned for the 2019 London Piano Festival at Kings Place and premiered by the performers on this album, this work evokes a long-term joyous friendship in the form of four conversations.

The first conversation is a brief build up, culminating in a sonorous flourish, which provides a short prelude to the second, which follows without a break. This ebullient moto perpetuo, with its slowly shifting patterns and sonorities seems an affectionate tribute to the Process music of the 1970s, couched in Dove’s distinctive harmonic vocabulary, with a chordal clarion call that is tossed between both players—a virtuoso display of fairness and affectionate competition between the two. The more relaxed, muted third conversation has a hint of elegy, and builds three times to a climax, each time with a different harmonic outcome, the third striking an almost triumphal note before the discourse subsides to the mood of the beginning. The quicksilver fourth conversation starts with a quiet challenge from one player, immediately answered by the other which escalates into a playful competition, veering from a manic tarantella, through lyrical episodes and rumbustious moments that careen close to evoking a Rock and Roll bass, before evaporating quickly in a surprise conclusion.

Dove had encountered the French-Canadian baritone, Philippe Sly, while in residence at the Banff Centre, Canada in 2009, and immediately wrote a song cycle for him, Three Tennyson Songs (2011). Who wrote the Book of Love? (2014) is a more extended piece, with the added expressive sound world of a string quartet. Commissioned for the Dante Quartet, it was written to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday in 2014 and was a further collaboration with his most regular writing partner, Alasdair Middleton, with whom he has written almost a dozen operas, and several song cycles and choral works. As the composer himself writes:

The seventeen lyrics that Alasdair wrote are by turn elegiac, enigmatic, sardonic and passionate. Each explores love from a different angle, with titles like ‘Gypsy Love’ and ‘Poet Love’. Some are terse or aphoristic, others more expansive. One quotes from Sappho, another evokes Lorca; there are echoes of folk song and cabaret. This offers a lot of musical possibilities, and although ‘Persian Love’ and ‘Greek Love’ do not attempt to suggest specific musical traditions, every song uses a different mode.

A series of often epigrammatic songs totalling just over thirty minutes could easily be discursive, but Dove and Middleton skilfully group the moods so that the whole has a sense of an overriding formal structure. The music is daring in its directness and simplicity, with the vocal writing, as ever, expertly attuned to the words and subtext and always grateful to sing. Even so, the overriding feel of the piece is rapt, even elegiac, as if this phenomenon called love is fragile, elusive and deceptive. The recurrent cries of ‘Cythera’, in Greek mythology the island of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, are those of yearning, rarely of fulfilment.

Vanishing gold was written in 2019 for the 40th anniversary of the Endellion Quartet, who then retired. It is a compact five-minute piece inspired by, as Dove put it:

Two little creatures: the once-abundant golden toad of Costa Rica was last seen thirty years ago, and has been declared extinct, while the golden coqui of Puerto Rico may also be extinct. Its distinctive two-note call is the starting-point for the piece, which is a hymn to these vanishing tiny golden amphibians.

The bird and toad calls are underpinned by an expansive melody worthy of Ravel, but the light-hearted propulsion of the opening gradually darkens, and after an anguished outcry, the strings in a low register outline a chordal elegy, with the characteristic two-note call defiantly lonely, as if in reproach for what has been lost.

Julian Grant © 2025

For over ten years now, we have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration and friendship with Jonathan Dove, this album being the latest landmark in that journey. Performing music of our time, and in some cases being part of its creation through commissioning, is one of the most important things we as musicians can do to make our art vital. These pieces of music will remain long after we are gone—a gift to our descendants and a testament to humanity’s insatiable urge to create. In some cases, such as Dove’s song cycle In Damascus, they also form part of the historical record—humanity’s response to significant events of the time. Maybe On the streets and in the sky will come to form a similar legacy.

Sacconi Quartet © 2025