This pair of duets setting two Shakespeare sonnets was premiered by Ian Partridge and Lynne Dawson, accompanied by Jennifer Partridge, at the Little Missenden Festival in 1989. Looking back near the end of her life on a fine performance, Ailsa Dixon expressed a regret we can only share that no recording had been made. ‘Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea’ is a ‘fearful meditation’ on the inexorable destruction wrought by time, countered at the end with a fragile, contingent note of defiant hope: ‘unless this miracle have might, That in black ink my love may still shine bright’. This evidently had a poignant resonance for Ailsa Dixon as a composer; she chose it to be read at her funeral, suggesting a hope that her compositions would survive her. The remarkable revival of her music, including many posthumous premieres, in the years since she died in 2017 has fulfilled that aspiration beyond her wildest dreams. It is paired here with a light-hearted rendition of ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’. The composer’s original programme note links the two sonnets as contrasting meditations on love and beauty:

‘The first asks how beauty and love can defeat Time, when his ravages affect the most durable things. The chief musical motif of alternately rising and falling intervals suggests at first the strength of these durable things, but at doubled and redoubled speeds becomes Time’s footfall and man’s panic. References to the ‘boundless sea’, to beauty’s flowering, and to the act of writing are present in the more flowing accompaniment figures.’

The vocal parts are treated equally in ‘Since Brass nor stone’, following one another in close counterpoint and united in a hushed declamatory monotone at ‘O fearful meditation!’ By contrast, the lover and his mistress in the second sonnet are dramatized in musical flirtation, the soprano’s wordless semi-staccato interventions a mercurial response to the sonnet’s playful inversion of the traditional tropes of courtly poetry in the tenor line. © Josie Dixon (please credit if using this programme note)