Dove – The Three Kings (2000)

Commissioned for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols (the carol service) at King’s College Cambridge in 2000, this work is for unaccompanied choir.

Robert Quinney writes:

Jonathan Dove’s The Three Kings, a setting of Dorothy L Sayers, was commissioned for the 2000 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Sayers’s division of the kings into three ages, with a stanza each—young, middle and old respectively—gives the piece its structure; the melancholic mood is immediately established by the beautifully simple lullaby refrain. Dove achieves a magical transformation at the start of the third stanza, by unexpectedly switching to the major mode. He then expands the scoring at ‘many a gaud and glittering toy’, the inner voices providing a sparkling pointillistic accompaniment to the slower-moving melody. An ecstatic climax is reached; but this subsides into a wistful repeat of the opening refrain, leaving a question-mark hanging over the scene.

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W11723_GBAJY0871611