Dr Jonathan Clinch

…in my end is my beginning…

This solo violin work was written for Peter Sheppard Skaerved – a New Year palindrome based on letters in his name, which references the final line of ‘East Coker’ within the Four Quartets of T S Eliot. Having attended one of his recitals in the glorious city church of St Mary Aldermary, I was inspired to arrange the dramatic work for organ pedals, as part of an ongoing project on Robert’s organ works.

The second arrangement (for organ manuals) is of the ‘Lament of Holger Danske’, a legendary Danish hero who is said to sleep in Kronborg Castle, waiting for the time when Denmark is in peril. After the thunderous pedal arrangement, this one explores a more minimalist aspect of Robert’s resonant violin sonorities at the organ.

Jonathan’s latest recording explores a new Pavane & Galliard by Robert Saxton. As with the recent Cooke upload, this performance explores the expressive potential of incorporating aspects of Renaissance technique and style into a Tudor-inspired composition, playing with the tension between the expectations of the genre and contemporary elements. The resulting recording aims to make the listener aware of how we ‘hear’ musical history and rely on it for our imaginative sense of the past.

“The atmosphere intended/implied is as though we are hearing (and sensing) two spectral dances. I imagined them being danced by a Tudor couple who, perhaps, have emerged from a portrait in a Norfolk stately home and ‘taken to the floor’ at night, before the National Trust/English Heritage open the doors the next morning!” (Robert Saxton, November 2025)

The next movement in Robert Saxton’s cycle, The Reckoning of Time. For me, the music and season will always be associated with Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet…

Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.