Between Blue Mirrors

SATB, piano, violin & ocean drum

20 minutes

Text: Jonathan Lennie

Commissioned and first performed by the Shetland Choral Society,

directed by Ruth Sharville, in the LerwickTown Hall to celebrate the

Cutty Sark Tall Ship’s Race in Shetland, May 1999.

The work was given its London premiere by The Harrow Choral Society, directed by Simon Williams, in November 2004, and its USA premiere by The Pittsburgh Compline Choir (and friends), directed by the composer, in June 2010.

Read the article about the Shetland concert and a review of the piece.

“...Between Blue Mirrors is eclectic and restless, yet a fully integrated

composition which speaks with musical authority...”

The Shetland Times, May 1999

“...a haunting, emotive and challenging piece...”

Harrow Choral Society, November 2004

Sound sample - opening pages - performed by

The Shetland Choral Society, directed by Ruth Sharville.

Between Blue Mirrors is a dramatic musical setting of a text by Jonathan Lennie which celebrates the sea, ships and sailors. The work was commissioned by the Shetland Choral Society for a concert given during the Cutty Sark Tall Ship’s Race, which came to the UK’s most northerly group of islands in May, 1999.

The work is scored for SATB, piano, violin and ocean drum. The text describes a Tall Ship battling with the elements - from flowing streams and raging storms, to navigating calm, mysterious waters. The sea and its nature are vividly depicted from sea gulls and salt spray to corals and, fathoms down through swirling currents, the dark depths and secrets of the ocean floor.

Jonathan Lennie, Simon Williams, director of the Harrow Choral Society, and Alastair Stout

Sound sample - the ship under sail - performed by the Pittsburgh Compline Choir (and friends), directed by the composer.

Sound sample - the folk song - performed by

the Pittsburgh Compline Choir (and friends).

After the central point of the work, ‘A ship’s bell tolls the missing hours of vanished souls’, Lennie weaves together previous images forming a surreal, fantastic seascape. A collage of the main musical themes accompanies this fragmented memory until the dream-ship’s mast impales the very sky itself and is dragged over the blue horizon into the ‘sea’ of the cosmos. As the work ends, the listener is audibly ‘dusted in carbon of slow-burning stars’, which fades like the quiet hush of the ebbing tide over pebbles.