Located in the UK
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- Peter Maxwell Davies
A Dream of Snow (2000)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Commissioned by Andreas Klatt for the Farnham Youth Choir
- children's chorus
- children's chorus
- 12 min
- Poems by George Mackay Brown
Programme Note
This enchanting 12-minute cycle is typical of the subtle and delicate way Max approaches writing for children : straightforward, tender, affectionate, yet with just a hint of the complexity found in challenging ‘adult’ works like the cycle Westerlings. George Mackay Brown’s poetry with its haiku-like short stanzas and pointilliste allusive imagery leaves you constantly intrigued : who is the boy ‘lost on the hill till sundown’, and why is time ‘a bird with white wings?’ Is this perhaps the poet himself playing a bit of holiday truant? ‘Lux Perpetua’ is a cheerful little scherzo in a syncopated 5/8 rhythm.
‘A Calendar of Kings’, with its almost spiritual accompanying vocalise, evokes the wise men themselves, ‘woken by the dawn lark’ and riding, it seems, not through dunes but hills in a northern evocation (‘at solstice the chalice of the sun spilled over’) of the Epiphany. ‘Good, good’ chant the young voices, like an impish mantra – yet the import of ‘Anne Bevan, sculptor’ is serious : shepherd, housewife, weaver, sculptor (perhaps even composer), makers and doers all, remind us that God, too, is a maker often pleased with his handiwork. The last poem, a gentle monody over lulling soft chords, could be the poet’s own epitaph : ‘Carve the runes / Then be content with silence.’
Roderic Dunnett
‘A Calendar of Kings’, with its almost spiritual accompanying vocalise, evokes the wise men themselves, ‘woken by the dawn lark’ and riding, it seems, not through dunes but hills in a northern evocation (‘at solstice the chalice of the sun spilled over’) of the Epiphany. ‘Good, good’ chant the young voices, like an impish mantra – yet the import of ‘Anne Bevan, sculptor’ is serious : shepherd, housewife, weaver, sculptor (perhaps even composer), makers and doers all, remind us that God, too, is a maker often pleased with his handiwork. The last poem, a gentle monody over lulling soft chords, could be the poet’s own epitaph : ‘Carve the runes / Then be content with silence.’
Roderic Dunnett