Northern Lights (2019)
(Concerto for Accordion and Chamber Orchestra )

“Why, oh why does Jonathan Dove insist on playing the accordion?” moaned a critic, reviewing my arrangement of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for City of Birmingham Touring Opera in 1988. I was not, it must be said, a skilled accordionist, but I found it a wonderfully versatile and useful instrument, and went on to write for it in several operas of my own, enjoying its ability to blend with other wind instruments and conjure up the folk music of different lands.  In one opera, The Adventures of Pinocchio, I even used two accordions together, inspired by a group of buskers I had heard in Naples.  

Most of the players I worked with were pupils of Owen Murray, who in 1986 created the accordion faculty at the Royal Academy of Music, making it the first conservatoire to offer teaching in classical accordion. Owen himself studied with the legendary Mogens Ellegaard in Copenhagen. He has dedicated himself to establishing the accordion in the classical world, in the face of widespread ignorance, and even hostility towards the instrument. He has had a huge influence in inspiring a new generation of young players. So I was delighted and honoured when Owen approached me to write him a concerto to play with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – although there was also a sad reason for the commission: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies had promised to write him a concerto, but died before he could complete it.  

Owen wanted a piece that would show the classical side of the instrument, rather than its folk aspect. He plays a freebass accordion, on which the left hand is free to play melodically, rather than the traditional oom-cha chords of the piano-accordion; and I wanted to show its surprisingly wide melodic range, its polyphonic possibilities, and the musicality of Owen’s phrasing. We were both keen to avoid amplification, although in certain halls it may still be needed.  Up close, the accordion sounds like a pipe organ, but from a distance, its sound is more delicate, and can easily be obscured by many orchestral instruments.

Thinking of Maxwell Davies naturally conjured up Orkney, from where you can see the Northern Lights: this suggested the basic scene of the concerto. In second movement, a watcher scans the night sky, wondering – and is rewarded with a display of the Northern Lights. In the outer movements, the watcher experiences a quickening of the senses that comes from connecting to the natural world, and a feeling of exuberance after witnessing one of nature’s marvels. Towards the end, a familiar tune is carried on the night air: Farewell to Stromness, by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, to whose memory the concerto is dedicated.

Jonathan Dove