The Stephen Dodgson International Choral Project was launched with a three-choir concert at the Barnes Music Festival which featured several world premieres and richly varied set of repertoire ranging spanning nearly 60 years from Dodgsons’s youthful works, the beautiful Lullaby and Winter and the humorous nursery rhyme Mrs Hen to his more developed richly crafted works Four Poems of Mary Coleridge, Home-Bred Pictures and his Two Choral Songs, the last of which ‘Earth-Music’ truly embodied the stormy rainy weather it portrayed.
See below for videos, reviews, programme and more.
Audience review
On 6th March 2023 a flute, a harp and three splendid groups of singers gave us an evening devoted to the choral works of Stephen Dodgson. Nearly ten years since his death at 89, Stephen Dodgson’s legacy as a composer continues to grow, and this concert given with the help of the Stephen Dodgson Charitable Trust and the Barnes Music Festival was the opening fanfare of a year-long exploration of his extensive choral repertoire.
I first became aware of Dodgson’s music at another concert sponsored by the trust during a brief lull in the lockdown, of his solo vocal pieces. I saw then how Dodgson’s impressionistic tone world is always disciplined by his acute sense of individual lines, and a rhythmic vitality that provides not only memorable motifs but organic inspiration. Tonight we saw this first of all with the Peregrine Ensemble (Conductor: Daniel Collins) in The Echoing Carol and Invocation. Each showcased solo voices and small groups in spiky motifs passing to and fro while underpinned by lower voices in chordal accompaniment, like a set of distant trombones. With even more chamber-music like quality we then heard Felicity Hayward, Tess Pearson and Leonora Dawson-Bowling in three part-songs with bird themes, brilliantly showing off Dodgson’s superb vocal line writing.
The highlight for me came with The Barnes Music Festival Consort (Conductor: James Day) and Esther Beyer on harp in Home Bred Pictures, five settings of John Clare’s poems, Dodgson’s favourite nature poet. It had everything, with two soulful outer movements in homophonic style looking back to earlier musical inspirations, and three startling pieces of evocative word painting. There was a waterfall, whose rushing fury we could almost taste, furious bees, and the croaks of a crow in bittersweet commentary on the bucolic love song of a ploughman. The final movement The Poet’s Death was both poignant and beautiful. This music reminded me of Dodgson’s opera Margaret Catchpole in many ways, and the music of Benjamin Britten. Maybe it was the harp!
Love and Nature were explored further in Four Poems of Mary Coleridge with the renowned chamber choir Pegasus (Conductor: Matthew Altham) and Carla Finesilver on solo flute. This was another proper showcase of choral agility and style, with some fantastic solo singing as well as beguiling virtuosic flute.
As one of the singers said to me afterwards, the music is “challenging but very learnable”. Dodgson’s craft is to flatter the performers with music that is sometimes hard, but sounds even harder, while still being expressive and moving.
And so, as the concert drew towards a close the music became simpler though no less attractive, showing Dodgson’s ability to write for children and for amateur and larger ensembles. Three songs for upper voices were followed by the collaboration of all three choirs in Two Choral Songs. The first of these, Tell me Gentle Wind was expressive and delightful, but the last piece of all Earth-music, was fabulously dramatic while allowing the singers to show off their skill and round off a sumptuous evening of song.
Rufus Stilgoe March 2023