The butterfly, and its dusky sibling the moth, are the subjects of Hesperos’ summer concert. Or are they? Butterflies are at once a symbol of exuberance and life, and time, ephemerality, and dreams. It is the most beautiful of all natural things, but it only lives for a matter of days. It is at once airborne, exuberant and dancing, and coloured with melancholy. The Greeks called them psyche, and made them metaphors of the human soul. They appear in seventeenth-century still life, reminding us of impermanence and the dusty, moth-like fragility of everything in nature. They are, as Shakespeare might have it ‘ such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’

This concert is built around two twentieth-century choral works, John Tavener’s Butterfly Dreams and Frank Martin’s Mass for double choir. Tavener sets short poems and texts drawn from dispersed places and times to create a strange, hallucinatory, fluttering piece that suggests the many different implications of the butterfly. Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, while becoming one of the most popular mass settings, was written in 1922 but left in the bottom of a drawer for forty years, as if cocooned and entirely hidden from view; he later said, “Through a sort of instinctive modesty I have done nothing to have these pieces performed. It sufficed me entirely to have written them”.

Around these are interspersed pieces that deal with time, nature, and ephemerality, much like a still life. From Tallis and Gibbons’ delicate musings on the impermanence of creatures, and Holst’s setting of mystic and metaphysical Henry Vaughan’s dialogue between the soul and the body, to Leighton’s setting of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’, Vaughan-Williams’ setting of Prospero’s final speech from TheTempest, and Reena Esmail’s gloriously meslismatic Tuttarana. 

Programme

God's Grandeur - Kenneth Leighton

Thou wast, O God - Thomas Tallis

The Evening Watch - Gustav Holst

Christe qui lux es et dies (I) - Robert White

Butterfly Dreams - John Tavener

The cloud capp'd towers - Ralph Vaughan Williams

Tuttarana - Reena Esmail

Interval

Mass for Double Choir - Frank Martin

Even such is time - Bob Chilcott