Dr Jonathan Clinch

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.