This work was written for the Portia Wind Ensemble who gave the first performance in November 1963. There are five short movements:
The music throughout is fairly light-hearted and entertaining although the structural development of thematic fragments is easily discernible. The score is inscribed to the novelist and poet Glyn Jones on the occasion of his 60th birthday.
Divertimenti for eight instruments Op.58
Dedicated to George Wilkinson
Alun Hoddinott's Divertimenti for Eight Instruments was commissioned by the Cheltenham Festival Committee and first performed by the Virtuoso Ensemble at Cheltenham on 11 February 1968. Scored for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass, there are five movements - scherzo 1 (Allegro and leggerio), Canzonetta (Andante semplice), Scherzo 2 (Allegro alla marcia), Barcaruola (Andante), Scherzo 3 (Presto).
The movements, of which the markings are more or less self-explanatory, are typical of Hoddinott's individual musical thinking - taut, concise, subtly related internally, with a very personal lyricism in the slow ones - and carried out with great technical expertise, though with a light touch suitable to 'divertimenti'. the eye detects at once many of the composer's 'fingerprints', melodic, harmonic, rhythmic - the toccata-like march of scherzo 2, for example, with its potent dotted rhythm coda; sudden rhythmic 'clusters', tonal juxtapositions; the prestissimo second part of Scherzo 3 in rapid quavers, woodwind staccato, strings tremolo, the horn with a chorale-like sustained theme.
© Burnett James
Record Review, March 1970
The Sun, the Great Luminary of the Universe
This work was commissioned by the Swansea Festival in memory of Leonard Pinn, the Festival's secretary from its inception in 1948 until 1965, and thereafter director until his death in 1969. The piece was first performed at the 1970 Festival by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley, and takes its title from a paragraph in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Although not descriptive, the music is illustrative, and each of the ten sections stems from one of the ten sentences in the paragraph:
The last day had come. Doomsday was at hand. The stars of heaven were falling upon the earth like the figs cast by the figtree which the wind has shaken. The sun, the great luminary of the universe, had become as a sackcloth of hair. The moon was bloodred. The firmament was as a scroll rolled away. The archangel Michael, the prince of the heavenly host, appeared glorious and terrible against the sky. With one foot in the sea and one foot on the land he blew from the archangelical trumpet the brazen death of time. The three blasts of the angel filled all the universe. Time is, time was but time shall be no more.
The structure of the music, although progressing through a series of opposing dynamic tensions, is cumulative, with a coda ending on a quiet cadence. Thematic ideas originate in the chorale melody Es ist genug (used by Bach), of which the first four bars are quoted exactly, and the Dies Irae, which is heard in a shadowy outline at the climax of the work.
© Alun Hoddinott
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
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