A Dream Unmade

Nari is excited to be presenting this program at the International Young Artists Competition in York, 2026!

"A Dream Unmade" is the story of idealized love, and its disintegration in the face of reality. Beginning with an experience of pure adoration, we soon slip into a passionate dream of our beloved, in which we almost become jealous of the wind and sun as they caress her. Hope remains strong in our heart, even when our love is not returned. But hope falters, and we find ourselves in the depths of a Winter of Love, cursing Love itself and raging against it. Finally, it is time to come to terms with reality: would it be easier simply not to love at all?

The Baroque was a fascinating era of experimentation with large-scale musical forms. Given enough soloists, good instrumentalists, and a few uninterrupted hours of an audience’s attention, each of the composers represented in our programme knew how to captivate the audience, move them, amuse, astonish, and even provoke critique. But this program’s dramatic concept presents a fundamentally different challenge, inviting the composers to distill a single facet of love within a highly compressed span of time. Like a dream, often experienced as far longer than the moment it occupies, the sequence presented here embodies multiple transformations of early eighteenth-century love. Thus, the composer who would shape the epic English oratorio is here called upon to embody idealised love in just four minutes; while the composer of monumental cycles such as the Tafelmusik is invited to evoke the Winter of Love in a miniature lasting scarcely two.

Program notes by Prof. Alon Schab