Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh… Here young Nelson is in the first year of secondary school - or would be if he turned up. Much of the time he is skiving, a continuation it seems of his primary school avoidance where his mother almost went to court over his absences. The story doesn't make much of this avoidance, but we can glean from it that Nelson is a solitary child with poor sight, who has to wear a patch to protect his eyes. MacLaverty doesn't tell us the disease but we can work it for ourselves based on the name of the patches he has to wear: Opticludes which are worn when people have amblyopia, weak vision in one eye, or basically a squint. If Oedipus blinds himself late in life realising that he has slept with his mother and killed his father, Nelson has poor eyesight early in life but, in a way, this is Oedipus Rex retold. Impressed by the quality of Bernadette's essay, he helps carry the winning vote for her. It wasn't until a little later in the story that he meets Bernadette for the first time to congratulate her for winning the top prize, and by degrees, their relationship grows and deepens. John is caught up in the fight between lust and staying true to his wife. The Girl he waited for was gone, his personal cheerleader was gone, and the person who believed in him more than he believed in himself was gone! She didn’t listen to him anymore, she didn’t care about his wants and needs, all she did was fight and scold. With their marriage dead for the past four years and John finding a new best friend - who is everything Abby was in the beginning - who could blame her?

The perfect marriage! That’s what every person see in John and Abby’s relationship. For almost 22 years they were the couple every other couple wanted to be. A Time to Dance' is perhaps a perfect short story, a small contained work that manages to evoke Edinburgh while invoking Ireland, to conjure up childhood without ignoring a mother's concerns, and is yet another Scottish tale about an absent father. ( Celia , On the Island , Shuggie Bain ). It also reaches into myth with a story of blindness that is likely to bring to mind Oedipus, and concludes with a biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes. It is also sensorially rich and offers too the occasional examples of witty defamiliarisation and restricted, even unreliable narration. The story is one of love, lust, jealousy, frustration, mixed loyalties, obsession, misunderstandings & the issues & problems that are present in a relationship where there is a large age & class gap, though common ground is found in this instance.And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.

It is indeed true that there were some raunchy scenes between the two main characters but they were entirely appropriate and in keeping with the plot. Well, it’s clear that the years I spent in the study and practice of Javanese gamelan music have been a huge influence. What interests me is adapting the deeper structures and compositional principles of gamelan music to Western resources. Steve Reich put it quite neatly: "one can study the rhythmic structure of non-Western music and let that study lead where it will, while continuing to use the instruments, scales and any other sounds one has grown up with". One of the most formative things I grew up with was singing, so I feel very much at home composing vocal/choral music. But when I come to work in a new medium, I take time to study with a master in that form. So when I was commissioned to compose a string quartet, for example, I spent a lot of time listening to Haydn. A Time to Dance is my first attempt at a cantata. I’m keen to do more, and so I’m now spending a lot of time listening to Bach. I spent a considerable time researching and assembling the text, whittling down over one hundred poems to the final choice of twenty-nine, drawn from a wide variety of sources ranging from Ovid to Aphra Behn. The choice was made not just by the suitability of the texts, but also by how they speak to each other. I followed my usual practice of taking the poems for a walk, listening to their melodies and rhythms, and learning how they might dance. Apart from the text, however, the main influences on the music of A Time to Dance were Shakespeare, Bach and Skidmore.

But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John…

Roth’s long relationship with Jeffrey Skidmore and Ex Cathedra has already yielded the exceptional Shared Ground (Signum, 2011), and their follow-up collaboration is even stronger. A Time to Dance is an hour-long cantata for a quartet of SATB soloists, choir and orchestra (here a Baroque band, inspired by the work’s original commission as a companion piece for Bach’s Magnificat), with all the makings of a modern classic—a work you’d want to perform and, crucially, perform again.I found it one of the most emotional and compelling dramas I have ever seen and I still remember it fondly & vividly today, some 18 years after being shown on TV. Musically this is a gloriously eclectic piece, with milonga-inspired movements sitting along Philip-Glass-esque polyrhythms, all set within the mould of Baroque-derived instrumentation. What would you say are the most significant influences on your compositional style? The descriptions - though at their best in doing so - don’t always cover the sex and love between the couple but also incorporate the narrator’s (and I presume Bragg’s) love of the Lake District. A Time to Dance was first performed in Sherborne Abbey on 9 June 2012 by Ex Cathedra, conducted by Jeffrey Skidmore. The work was commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer Music Society of Dorset, founded by its President and Artistic Director, Dione Digby, in 1963. The brief was to provide a large-scale, celebratory work, reflecting the passage of time and fifty years of music-making. The seed that set my creative juices flowing was the text which Lady Digby suggested as a possible starting point—the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes which I have used for the opening Processional. This lovely, profoundly human text provided the four key themes which permeate the whole work: times; seasons; love; dance.

They're the perfect couple—envied by their friends, cherished by their children, admired by their peers. But John and Abby Reynolds know they're just pretending to be happy. In fact, they're waiting for the right time to tell the kids they're going to divorce. Vivaldi to mind, and I couldn’t resist incorporating a few references to his music, although I now regret mentioning it in my notes for the CD booklet. Vivaldi is a generous composer, his musical ideas ripe for further development, as Bach so often demonstrated. My Vivaldi references vary from a short snippet of melody, to a quite sizeable, much re-composed section, but they have no “deeper significance”, and you haven’t missed anything if you don’t recognise them.

I hope this fine recording will bring it to the attention of a wider public, as it deserves. I hope also that other choirs will take it up, especially as it can be performed on modern instruments.” Choral societies are hungry beasts and there are only so many Rutter Glorias they can consume. With A Time to Dance Roth has provided a serious alternative—a contemporary work of real character and energy. Alec Roth writes… “ A Time to Dance was first performed in Sherborne Abbey on 9 June 2012 by Ex Cathedra, conducted by Jeffrey Skidmore. The work was commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer Music Society of Dorset, founded by its President and Artistic Director, Dione Digby, in 1963. The brief was to provide a large-scale, celebratory work, reflecting the passage of time and fifty years of music-making. The seed that set my creative juices flowing was the text which Lady Digby suggested as a possible starting point—the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes which I have used for the opening Processional. This lovely, profoundly human text provided the four key themes which permeate the whole work: times; seasons; love; dance..”