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Air and Angels
Vocal and instrumental scores and parts on hire
978-0-19-358350-4
14 August 2003
Price: Available on request
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for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed chorus (with divisions), and orchestra
Settings of poems by John Donne taken from Holy Sonnets and Songs and Sonnets. Forces or CategorySoprano & baritone soloists, SATB, full orchestraDuration30 minutesDifficultyModerately difficult to DifficultOrchestration3 fl (II+picc, III+picc&afl), 3 ob (III+ca), 3 cl (III+bcl), 3 bn (III+cbn), 4
hn, 4 tpt, 3 tbn, tba, timp, 3 perc (vib, TD, hi-hat, glock, 2 sus cym, guiro, BD, tbells, flex, sz cym, 4 tom, tam), hp, pn, elec gtr, b gtr, strProgramme NotesCantata for Soprano and Baritone, SATB chorus, and orchestra.
The beautiful language of John Donne (1572-1631), stunning in its immediacy, suggestive in its ambiguity and often surprising in its modernity, is familiar, even if at times his imagery is knotty and difficult. Perhaps music, with its greater expressive range, its forms unfolding in time, can help to explain such language.
Almost all the poems I have chosen here are love poems, and are principally about the relation of human to divine love - a theme big enough
for a much larger work than this! They range from the intimate and erotic (A Lecture upon the Shadow and Break of Day) to the apocalyptic (At the round Earths Imagined Corners). The poems are arranged roughly symmetrically around the central Nocturnall to give a particular shape to the piece, which moves towards, and then away from, the dark despair at the heart of no 4., framed by Donnes vision of judgment, and ending with a fragment of another poem (Death be not proud). I have separated the two verses of Air and Angels to help the symmetry, and to break up what is certainly the densest poem in the sequence.
Angels, in their many manifestations, are a favourite image for Donne (who evidently knew and believed the mediaeval view of angels, as found for instance in the Summa
Theologia of S. Thomas Aquinas). I like to think of music, itself an invisible messenger, real but untouchable, present but then immediately absent, as being an angel too.
Air and Angels was commissioned for the 2003 Hereford Three Choirs Festival by the Three Choirs Festival Society with financial assistance from the performing rights society.
© Anthony Powers 2003
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
The full text of this piece is available from the Repertoire Promotion Department.
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Anthony Powers (b.1953) Born in London in 1953, Anthony Powers studied at Oxford, in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and at York with David Blake and Bernard Rands. He taught for two years at Dartington College of Arts before being appointed Composer-in-Residence to Southern Arts. Since then he has moved to Herefordshire where he continues to divide his time between composing and teaching, currently at Cardiff University, where he has been Professor of composition since 2004.
Powers's music is characterized by strong architectonic frameworks that support a language of poetic intensity and magical sonorities. His music often takes its inspiration from the tension between different states, be they physical properties, landscapes, seasons or emotions.Anthony Powers at Cardiff University
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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