Victory’s Shadow

The Umbra Lucis Ensemble present an intriguing disc portraying the Anghiari Battle in works by Byrd, Dowland, Andreuccetti, Dufay, de Victoria, Hume and others. The relationship between music and war bears witness to the ethical dimension of music and its impact on the human. But warfare is also a metaphor and sign of the battles to which the existence is voted: amorous disputes, moral duels … In a word: the dialectic between shadow and light that which incessantly beats life. Shadow and light that has marked, according to the contemporary chronicle, also one of the symbolic events of the Italian Renaissance: he Battle of Anghiari.

Bernard Stevens's Dance Suite, Opus 28, was written in 1957 and first performed in a radio broadcast in 1961 by the BBC Northern Orchestra under George Hurst. Any listener expecting a relaxed sequence of light music will soon be rudely disabused. In choosing his title Stevens may well have been thinking of the Dance Suite of Béla Bartók, like his own, a challenging and substantial work founded on a complex sublimation of national dance-rhythms. The four movements of Stevens's suite create the impression of something more like a concise and vigorous 'dance symphony'; and like ……