JONATHAN DOVE is one of the most versatile composers of his generation - he has written music for orchestra, chamber and choral ensembles, opera, theatre and film.

Flight, his first full-length main-house opera was given its world première in 1998 by Glyndebourne Touring Opera. It met with an extremely enthusiastic response both from audiences and from music critics. Flight was staged again the following year by Glyndebourne Festival Opera, when it was also broadcast nationally on British television. Dove’s other operas include Siren Song (Almeida Opera) and L’Augellino Belverde (Musica Nel Chiostro) along with the chamber operas Pig and Greed for the English National Opera Studio.

In 1999 Almeida Opera gave the world première of Tobias and the Angel, a church opera with community involvement: as well as eight professional singers, children and amateurs undertake the roles of angels, sparrows, wedding guests, the voices of trees, mountains and river, and a big fish. His most recent community opera The Palace in the Sky, a modern urban reworking of the story of the building of the Tower of Babel, was given its world première performances at the Hackney Empire in November 2000.

In his long association with Glyndebourne, Dove has written three large-scale community operas. In performances of one of these works, In Search of Angels, 600 amateur performers led an audience round Peterborough Cathedral and then out into a shopping centre where angels came down the escalators!

Dove has also helped to bring opera to audiences it doesn’t normally reach by arranging great works for a small orchestra: his arrangements for City of Birmingham Touring Opera have always been well received, most famously his daring two-evening adaptation of Wagner’s Ring. In 1998 CBTO successfully toured his version of Janávcek’s The Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears.

The Passing of the Year, a song cycle for double chorus and piano, was commissioned by the London Symphony Chorus and was premièred in March 2000. A new version of this work, for double chorus, two pianos and percussion, was commissioned for the 200th anniversary of Edition Peters. Other new choral works include I am the Day for the Spitalfields Festival, Bless the Lord, O My Soul for the Eton College Chapel Choir and The Three Kings for the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.

Acknowledged as a highly accomplished composer of theatre music, Dove has written for the Royal National Theatre, notably Mother Courage and Money, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for the New York Shakespeare Festival. Since 1990 he has been Music Adviser to the Almeida Theatre, where his scores have included Medea and Hamlet (both of which have also been heard on Broadway) Phèdre, Britannicus and Plenty (Almeida at the Albery). In 1998 Dove was joint winner of the Christopher Whelen Award for his work in the fields of theatre music and opera. Films include Venus Peter and Prague.

Dove’s fondness for strong pulse and dancing rhythms has made him a natural collaborator in dance. He has written a dozen works for the company DanceArt and its choreographer Clare Whistler.

Not surprisingly for a composer so passionate about opera, a dramatic sense can be felt in Dove’s purely instrumental works. His wind serenade Figures in the Garden, which uses themes from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, was commissioned by Glyndebourne to celebrate Mozart’s bicentenary. Dove’s flute concerto for Emily Beynon, The Magic Flute Dances, commissioned by YCAT and first performed in February 2000, takes as its starting point the scenario at the end of Mozart’s Magic Flute and imagines the flute as a character in its own right.

His lively, celebratory style has often been sought for special occasions: for the BBC’s British Music Year festivities and Purcell tercentenary concert, he provided fanfares playfully combining Purcell themes; in 1997, BT commissioned The Ringing Isle in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Association of British Orchestras. He was commissioned to write a new fanfare for the opening of the Millennium Dome as well as a new arrangement of the National Anthem for the same event. Another Dove fanfare heralded the opening of the new Millennium Bridge across the Thames in May 2000.

In September 2001, the Vanbrugh String Quartet gave the première of Jonathan Dove’s first string quartet, Out of Time. Future projects include Stargazer, a trombone concerto for Ian Bousfield and the London Symphony Orchestra, The Hackney Chronicles, a children’s opera for the Hackney Music Development Trust, and a work for the Northern Sinfonia to celebrate the completion of Norman Foster’s new Music Centre in Gateshead in 2002.

Jonathan Dove is now Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival, and his carol Run, Shepherds, Run received its first performance there in December 2001. In August 2002, his made-for-TV opera When She Died explored the reactions of five people to the death of Princess Diana and was watched by a record 1 million + people.

Dove’s works have been exclusively published by Peters Edition Limited since 1998.