David Dubery: Composer Update, 2017

I have occasionally posted reviews and updates on David Dubery’s music on my blog. See the right-hand sidebar composer listings on this page for details.

Dubery is a North Country composer who writes music that is invariably well-constructed and always perfectly tailored to the genre. It is approachable, and never fails to be interesting and satisfying. Over the Christmas period David Dubery has sent me an update on his musical activates.

David Dubery writes:

2016 has been a very busy year. In the early Spring, I began composing a trio for piano, violin and cello from an idea I had sketched as far back as October 2013. Further work was postponed while I became engrossed with the project of the Observations CD for Métier, released in 2014. So far, I have completed two movements of the trio and hope to get started on the third this year.

April through to December (2016) has been constantly busy with re-edits and formatting of scores, proof readings and corrections for the publication of my Sonata for oboe and piano, ‘Since dawn is breaking,’ dating from 1981 It was published in July by Emerson Edition. The Sonata was premiered in 1982 at the Manchester Mid-day Concerts Society, performed by the Verlaine Duo (myself the pianist): it was recorded live by BBC Radio.

To relieve the tedium of formatting and editing, I found time to tidy up two short woodwind concert pieces - Chimera, for clarinet and piano, and Music for an untold story, for flute and piano, as well as a couple of early SATB a-cappella pieces: A babe is born and Love is kind.

In 2015 I completed five settings of poems by the poet Pam Zinnemann-Hope, wife of the composer Peter Hope.  Titled The Colour of Words, and with a duration of around 17 minutes, the settings and poems offer tiny autobiographical snapshots, memories, anxieties, emotions, history and experiences within family relationships, and distances both personal and physical. It is still waiting for a performance! [Stop Press James Gilchrist ; tenor, and pianist Benjamin Frith will give the first performance of ‘Visit’ from The colour of words  (poems by Pam Zinnemann-Hope), for the Gloucester Music Society on March 25th  at 3pm at the Chapter House, Gloucester Cathedral,

I am grateful and honoured to have been interviewed and included by Andrew Palmer in his latest book Encounters with British Composers published during 2015 by Boydell Press. This book includes many fascinating discussions with several composers for whom I have great admiration and respect, and a few who I know quite well.

  

My Three Songs to Poems by Robert Graves (Dubery Songs & Chamber Music album) have had recent performances at The William Alwyn Festival (2013), Durham (2015) by the Neville Ensemble, and in Seattle, USA (2016) by local professional musicians

Sadly, after three terrific recital performances of my string quartet, the Cuarteto Ibérico during 2015, (including the premiere at the Manchester Bridgewater Hall in February), the wonderful Cavaleri Quartet disbanded. Their leader, Martyn Jackson is now the new leader and first violinist of the Allegri Quartet.

Fortunately for me, there have been regular radio broadcasts from both my albums throughout the past three years. 

I look forward to hearing more of David Dubery’s music in 2017. JF