Jonathan Dove

Composer

Jonathan Dove joined Cape Farewell on the 2008 Disko Bay Expedition, visiting the spectacular Disko Bay area of West Greenland with over 40 international artists, journalists and scientists.

Winner of the 2008 Ivor Novello Award for Classical Music, Jonathan Dove is known for taking opera to new places and reaching new audiences. Last year, his ‘musical tale’ The Enchanted Pig was given over 80 performances at the Young Vic and on tour. His most recent opera, The Adventures of Pinocchio, attracted whole families into opera houses around the country. For many children, this will have been their first experience of opera.

He has written two operas specially for television. When She Died, about the public reaction to the death of Princess Diana, was watched by nearly a million people in the UK alone at its first broadcast. Man on the Moon won the Opera Special Prize at the Rose d’Or festival.

An unusual achievement has been a series of “community operas” in different parts of the UK, sometimes involving several hundred performers in a single event. His community cantata On Spital Fields received a Royal Philharmonic Society award and a British Composers award.

His highly successful airport-comedy Flight, first produced at Glyndebourne in 1998 and subsequently performed in Holland, Belgium, Germany, Australia and America, will be presented in London this September by British Youth Opera.

Jonathan has written the music for 30 theatre productions, most recently His Dark Materials for the National Theatre. In 1998 he was joint winner of the Christopher Whelen Award for his work in the fields of theatre music and opera. From 2001-2006 he was Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival.

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