- Home
- Listen
- News
- Biography
- Works
- Orchestral
- Symphony No.1
- The Burning of the Leaves (version for Baritone and Orchestra)
- 2011 Concertante Variations (Presteigne Concerto) for Wind Quintet, Timpani and Strings
- Angry Lament
- Sixteen Sunrises
- Symphony No.5
- Symphony No.2
- Sea-Change
- The Flight of Icarus
- Channel Firing
- Partita
- Symphony No.3
- The Spindle of Necessity
- Piano Concerto
- Tenebrae
- Symphony No. 5
- In Sea-Cold Lyonesse
- Binyon Songs (version for Baritone and Orchestra)
- Forbidding Mourning
- The Art of Beginning
- Ensemble
- Chamber
- Instrumental
- Choral
- Programme notes
- Black Castles
- The Flight of Icarus
- Agamemnon’s Tomb
- Aurora
- The Borders of Sleep – Nine Poems by Edward Thomas
- Channel Firing
- Eden
- Orion
- The Phagotus of Afranio
- Piano Sonata
- Sonata for Violin and Piano
- A Starlit Dome
- String Quartet No.2
- String Quartet No.3
- String Quartet No.4
- Symphony No.3
- Tenebrae
- String Quartet No.2
- Orchestral programme notes
- Instrumental programme notes
- Chamber programme notes
- Brass programme notes
- Solo vocal programme notes
- Choral programme notes
- Spindle of Necessity
- Gaia Symphony
- Tsunami
- Men of Stone – Symphonic Suite for Brass Band
- Wildfire
- Sea-Change
- Piano Concerto
- Valedictions
- Snowbound
- Insomnia
- John Pickard: Chamber Music CD
- Binyon Songs
- Mass in Troubled Times Programme Note
- Brass
- Solo vocal
- Transcriptions
- Orchestral
- Performances
- Recordings
- Reviews
- Review of Gaia Symphony
- The Flight of Icarus
- Reviews of Norrköping Symphony Orchestra CD of The Flight of Icarus, The Spindle of Necessity and Channel Firing
- The Burning of the Leaves
- BIS Record CD of Piano Concerto, Sea-Change & Tenebrae – International Record Review
- BBC Music Magazine – Piano Concerto, Sea-Change and Tenebrae
- Tenebrae reviewed on MusicWeb International.com
- BIS Records CD of Piano Concerto Sea Change Tenebrae Classica
- Guardian review String Quartets Nos 1 and 5
- Classical Lost and Found review string quartets nos 1 and 5
- International Record Review String Quartets Nos 1 and 5
- Toccata New Chamber Music, Volume 2.
- BBC Review Toccata Classics Chamber Music Volume Two
- Musical Opinion – an overview of The Symphonies of John Pickard
- In concert – Bristol University SO / John Pickard – The Vision of Cleopatra
- Reviews of String Quartet No.4
- Chamber Music and Tenebrae reviewed in German
- String Quartet No.5 – Brodowski Quartet at Purcell Room
- Quartets 2 -4
- Athene-Minerva CD of Piano music
- Negative reviews of The Flight of Icarus
- Orion and The Borders of Sleep
- Agamemnon’s Tomb
- Contact
A Starlit Dome
[audio:https://johnpickard.co.uk/jp_audio/starlit_dome.mp3]Raymond Clarke (piano)
(Diversions 24111)
By kind permission of Divine Art Recordings
A Starlit Dome was composed in 1995 in response to a commission from the Criccieth Festival in association with the Arts Council of Wales. It was written for the pianist Iwan Llewelyn-Jones, who gave the first performances and to whom it is dedicated. In 1997, shortly after its London premiere, I revised the end of the work.
The title comes from W.B. Yeats’ Byzantium – lines which exactly sum up my feelings about the universe:
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
As a keen amateur astronomer, it often occurred to me that if I were to try my hand at writing a nocturne it would probably be very different in character from those of, say, Chopin or Field. And so it proved: ‘A Starlit Dome’ is an astronomical nocturne.
When one looks through a telescope at the Great Nebula in Orion, for example, the image is at first faint and unclear (hardly surprising, as it lies some 1600 light years away). It seems little more than a patch of grey mist in the night sky, silent and apparently quite still. But the longer one looks, the more detail emerges: a greenish tint to the mist and a recognisable structure, which, after a few observations, can easily be drawn from memory. At the centre of the nebula lies a trapezium of bright new stars. It is by their light that the nebula appears to glow. In fact the whole thing is a whirling mass of gas and dust, gradually coalescing into new stars and perhaps new planetary systems.
This piece tries to reflect something of how I feel about such phenomena. It begins quietly and mysteriously, slowly coming into focus. Gradually the pace quickens and the activity increases, the music becoming louder and more virtuosic, until at the end it is bursting with energy.
John Pickard