With its title quoting Walt Whitman, Jonathan Dove’s 50-minute cantata commemorates the life of a boy who was tragically drowned in
a swimming accident at the age of 19. His mother, Rosemary Pickering, asked Dove to write this cantata, whose nine sections add up to a most powerful, tonal and tuneful work.

The sequence of poems reminds one of the similarly apt choice of words that Britten and Pears made for such works as the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the Nocturne. The first movement sets a poem of Charles Causley, ‘I am the song’, opening with a fanfare-like passage echoing Walton, leading to fluent choral writing typical of Dove. It then switches to a setting of a poem by Langston Hughes, with the soprano soloist singing jingles in parallel phrases.

To words by Thomas Traherne, the second movement is reflective, dealing with childhood; soprano and tenor are both involved, accompanied by a pianissimo chorus. The third movement, ‘A Song About Myself’, sets untypical words by John Keats, sharply rhythmic like a nursery rhyme, sung here by the children’s choir. The next two movements, both short, set poems by Emily Dickinson. The first is a galloping 6/8 setting of ‘From all the jails the boys and girls’, followed by a gentler movement, ‘Over the fence’.

The sixth movement, ‘All shod with steel’, has words taken from Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude – a winter scene involving skating on ice, vividly illustrated by Dove in his waltz-like music. The seventh movement, ‘Romance’, uses WJ Turner’s much-anthologised poem about childhood, with the tenor soloist clearly enunciating the tongue-twister words, ‘Chimborazo, Cotopaxi’ and ‘Shining Popocatépetl’, which children love.

The following movement, ‘New Worlds’, sets first a poem by Traherne, leading to ‘High Flight’ by John Gillespie Magee, an American poet killed in a mid-air collision during the Second World War at the age of 19. Next comes the poem written on the night before his execution by the Elizabethan Chidiock Tichborne in 1583. Finally, in the longest movement, comes the setting of the Walt Whitman poem which gives the whole work its title, ‘There was a child’, a grand ensemble finale which ends with the optimistic sentiment, ‘and will always go forth every day’.

This live recording, taken from the first performance in Birmingham under the inspired direction of Simon Halsey, could hardly be more powerful or evocative, with sharp definition of the different textures, choral and orchestral, with children’s voices most moving of all. It would be surprising if Dove’s touching inspiration did not inspire local choral societies to give it regular airings, encouraged by this fine recording. It helps that full texts are included with the notes.