Jonathan Pease – New Oboe Music Project

This month, Jonathan Pease tells us all about his fantastic new work for Cor Anglais and Piano called Westbourne Nocturne.

Westbourne Nocturne

Nicola Hands & Jonathan Pease (recorded in October 2020)

Instrumentation: Cor Anglais and Piano
Duration: 10 mins
Premiere: Premiered and recorded by Nicola Hands and Jonathan Pease

I have had the pleasure of working with oboist Nicola Hands for many years now. In 2019, she asked me to write a piece of music to celebrate our partnership, worthy of inclusion on a CD which would also contain the première recording of Paul Patterson’s Phoenix Sonata for oboe and piano. I wanted to base the piece on something that connected us and turned to London’s Westbourne Park, to which my houseboat finds its way for a few weeks of each year, usually around summer.

This district, lurking above Notting Hill, takes its name from the River Westbourne: an underground river which flows from the hills of Hampstead down to the River Thames at Chelsea, coincidentally passing Nicola’s Kilburn abode on its merry course. Sonatina in form but nocturne in character, the piece is an evocation of Westbourne Park at night. The contrasts and contradictions of this neighbourhood, where a gentle canal runs alongside the Westway Flyover and a stucco semi-gentility has witnessed a long history of alternative, international and popular culture, provided generous inspiration.

As an aside, Nicola and I had enjoyed performing and recording an unusual work called Watersmeet by Lamont Kennaway, based on the woodlands and gorges of north Devon. It occurred to me that, for two city-dwellers, a companion piece based on a more urban body of water might be just the thing.

Writing Westbourne Nocturne was a very unusual experience for me. As I compose almost exclusively opera and church music, it occurred to me that I’d never written anything without words before. From a musical perspective, the movement derives almost entirely from a pattern of ascending fourths, stated in no uncertain terms by the cor anglais at the movement’s outset.

The work has been described as “my favourite work on this CD… moody and sometimes smoochy… stunningly beautiful… one of the most evocative London pieces in the repertoire” (MusicWeb International) and “urgently passionate before settling into pastoral tranquility” (ReviewsGate.com), and I hope will be a favourite with cor anglais players who are unjustly starved of recital repertoire. It may also be a favourite with pianists: at the end of the piece, a moment of ‘accompanist’s revenge’ sees pianist take over the melody while the spindling accompaniment figures are generously assigned to the cor anglais!

A performance, with score, of the work can be found here. A preview of the score can be found here on Jonathan’s website. To purchase the score, please contact Jonathan via his website. The full CD, Phoenix, can be purchased here.

About Jonathan Pease

Jonathan graduated with an M.A. in Music from Cambridge University in 2010, where he studied composition with Giles Swayne. His first full-length opera, These Things Happen, about eight twenty-somethings discussion their romantic problems in a bar one evening, enjoyed eight performances at the Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton, in 2012. His second, Concrete Music, about the life and suicide of a megalomanic 1960s architect, was completed in 2017 and premièred at Poplar Union in 2020. A Biblical children opera, St. Luke’s Shipwreck, commissioned for the 150th anniversary of an East London Primary School, was first performed in front of the Bishop of Stepney and the Mayor of Tower Hamlets in 2019; while a chamber opera about cultural divisions in America, Marginalised Groups, was completed in 2018 and revised in 2020. He has been a finalist in the ENO Mini Operas competition and the Opera UpClose Flourish! competition and works to his own libretti.

Jonathan is also a prolific composer of church music. A set of 12 liturgical anthems written for the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music was first performed in May 2019. A longer anthem Whither I go, ye cannot come was used as the basis for a music video directed by David Jones. His setting of the Responses for Evening Prayer was first performed at St Martin in the Fields, London, in 2017, while a liturgical Missa Brevis completed in 2020 enjoyed its first performance this year. In addition, he completed Songs of Winter and Isolation, a Song Cycle designed for non-professional choir written in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, during the 2020 lockdown.