Premiered in Manchester in 1929, Constant Lambert’s dazzling setting of Sacheverell Sitwell’s poem The Rio Grande has become a favourite with audiences and singers alike. Jazz rhythms are used wittily in this brilliant work, arranged in this performance for two pianos, choir and five percussionists. Lambert, who admired Duke Ellington and proclaimed his harmonic roots in Frederick Delius, was a fearless reconciler of what the academies and Tin Pan Alley alike presumed to be eternally opposed.
Jonathan Dove is one of the country’s leading composers. Arion and the Dolphin, his most recent choral work, is a dramatic cantata for countertenor solo, children’s choir, adult mixed choir, two pianos and percussion, told in lively verse by Dove’s long-time collaborator Alasdair Middleton. In Dove’s own words:
"Arion is a young poet from Corinth who wins first prize in a singing contest in Sicily. During his voyage home, the sailors plot to kill him and keep his prize-money. Arion begs to sing one last song, and they allow him. His song draws dolphins to the ship. As soon as he finishes his song, he jumps overboard and is rescued by one of the dolphins who carries him to safety. The dolphin ends among the stars, as the constellation Delphinus.
The story is told as a sequence of songs, with a soloist as Arion, tenors and basses as the sailors, and children’s voices representing the dolphin".
Collegium Musicum of London joins forces with some of the leading instrumentalists and soloists in the country, including counter-tenor David Allsopp, as well as St Catherine’s College Cambridge Girls’ Choir, for what promises to be a spectacular evening’s music making in one of the capital’s best-loved concert venues.