Composer: Dove, Jonathan (b. 1959)

Few composers working today have embraced the modern opera house as consistently and successfully as Jonathan Dove. His incomparable catalogue of more than twenty diverse operatic works is indicative of a practical and lively theatrical mind, steeped in operatic experience. In all his music, Dove has a strong desire to communicate, to entertain, and to provoke transformative experiences. His musical language is at once immediately appreciated by listeners new to the concert hall and has provided performers, audiences and directors with rich possibilities for interpretation; several of his major operatic works have been performed in multiple productions all over the world, and his list of commissioners includes some of the world’s greatest musicians. He is one of the only living composers able to write successful comic opera, to sustain a company through 150 performances of a single opera, or to captivate a million viewers with a single performance.

His operas number over twenty, and include the airport-comedy Flight, two operas for television, several chamber operas, and a frequently-performed church opera, Tobias and the Angel. Dove has also created a series of “community operas” and two operas ‘for all the family’: The Enchanted Pig and The Adventures of Pinocchio. In 1998 he was joint winner of the Christopher Whelen Award for his work in the fields of theatre music and opera. His community cantata On Spital Fields received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and a British Composer Award, and in 2008 Dove was awarded a second British Composer Award for The Adventures of Pinocchio. Jonathan Dove was the recipient of the Ivor Novello Award for classical music in 2008.