SKU: PE.EP72822
ISBN 9790577011769. 232 x 303mm inches. English.
I have only visited Damascus once, twenty years ago, on the way to Palmyra. I had a purpose (I was writing music for a play about Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia) but essentially I was a tourist. Like any visitor, I was thrilled to step out of the noisy modern city into the magical ancient world of the walled Old City, its vibrant souk leading to the magnificent mosque, and a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets filled with the smell of unleavened bread.
In Palmyra, I was met with extraordinary kindness everywhere. On one occasion, a little Bedouin boy noticed that I was risking sunstroke wandering bare-headed among the spectacular ruins: he showed me how to tie a turban, then took me to have tea with his family in their tent.
Since then, I have watched helplessly as these places of wonder have been devastated and their inhabitants scattered and killed. When the Sacconi Quartet suggested that I might choose a Syrian poet for our collaboration, I welcomed the idea.
I searched for a long time to find a contemporary poet whose work might gain from any music I could imagine. I felt it was important to find first-hand accounts of the Syrian experience – but, of course, I was always reading them in translation. In an anthology called Syria Speaks, I was astonished to read something that looked like prose, but was full of poetry. It was Anne-Marie McManus’s fine translation of Ali Safar’s A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky – an eloquent, thoughtful, contained yet vivid account of life in a war-torn country, all the more moving for its restraint.
In setting these words, I have not attempted to imitate Syrian music. However, there is what might be called a linguistic accommodation in my choice of scale, or mode. Several movements are in a mode that I first discovered while writing a cantata commemorating the First World War: it has a tuning that I associate with war, its violence and desolation. This eight-note mode is similar to scales found in Syrian music. I did not choose it in the abstract: it emerged from the harmonies I was exploring in the earlier work, and emerged again as I was looking for the right musical colours to set Ali Safar’s words. In this work, its Arabic aspect is more prominent. - Jonathan Dove
SKU: HL.346713
UPC: 840126925029. 5.0x5.0x0.15 inches.
The 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, chronicling several years of superstar Taylor Swift's personal and public life, received rave reviews when it debuted in 2020. This song, which plays over the end credits of the film, was praised for raising awareness of the prevalence of gun violence in America.
SKU: BR.PB-5576
ISBN 9790004213865. 6.5 x 9 inches.
Little is known about the actual composition process of Lemminkainen, and the performance and publication history is rather complex, resulting in a first complete printing of all four movements en suite through the complete edition of Jean Sibelius Works only in 2013.In summer 1894 Sibelius went to Central Europe, carrying among others a plan for an opera freely based on the Kalevala in his mind. But during this trip he reassessed his composing: I think I have found my old self again, musically speaking. I think I really am a tone painter and a poet. As a result he abandoned his opera plans, but musical parts may have found their way into the Lemminkainen pieces which he started composing during that time. Definitely the overture had, it is now known and loved as The Swan of Tuonela.Lemminkainen became popular from the beginning and has attained a fixed position in the concert repertoire.On Lemminkainen and the Maidens on the Island a critic opined: We do not hesitate to award this tone painting of Lemminkainen's erotic emotional world the first prize among all the young composer's works. Sibelius himself said about Lemminkainen in Tuonela: The cradle song at the end of the work is maternal love, which rakes the pieces of Lemminkainen together from the River Tuonela. and commented on Lemminkainen's Return: I would like to see more pride in us Finns. Why should we be ashamed? This is the underlying thought in Lemminkainen's Return. Lemminkainen is just as good as the noblest of earls. He is an aristocrat, without question an aristocrat!.
