RES10108 THE EVERLASTINGCROWN JUDITH BINGHAM Stephen Farr - Organ The Everlasting Crown Judith Bingham (b. 1952) The Everlasting Crown (2010) 1. The Crown [3:52] Stephen Farr organ 2. Coranta: Atahualpa’s Emerald [3:20] 3. La Pelegrina [4.38] 4. The Orlov Diamond [2:56] 5. The Russian Spinel [4:22] 6. King Edward’s Sapphire [5:34] 7. The Peacock Throne [7:09] About Stephen Farr: Total playing time [31:54] ‘ superbly crafted, invigorating performances, combining youthful vigour and enthusiasm with profound musical insight and technical fluency’ All tracks are world premiere recordings and were Gramophone recorded in the presence of the composer ‘[...] in a superb and serious organ-recital matinee by Stephen Farr, the chief work was the world premiere of The Everlasting Crown by Judith Bingham’ The Observer The Everlasting Crown The gemstone is seen as somehow drawing these events towards itself: its unchanging Ideas for pieces often, for me, result from and feelingless nature causes the inevitable coming across oddball books, be it anthologies ruin of the greedy, ambitious, foolish and of poetry, or out of print rarities. A few years foolhardy, before passing on to the next ago I came across Stories about Famous victim. One wonders why anyone craves the Precious Stones by Adela E. Orpen (1855- ownership of the great stones as their history 1927), published in America in 1890. In this is of nothing but ruin and despair! All of the book, it is not the scholarship that matters, stones in this piece can still be seen, many more the romance and mythology of the of them in royal collections, some in vaults. chosen famous gems. It caught my I went to the Tower of London before I started imagination immediately and I squirrelled the work, to see the extraordinary diamonds it away for future use. I was reminded of it in the Queen’s collection, and a photograph again in reading a Sherlock Holmes story I often looked at was Cecil Beaton’s Grand ‘The Blue Carbuncle’ – written about the Guignol portrait of the Queen, set against same time as the Orpen in 1892. In describing the background of Westminster Abbey, the priceless blue sapphire of the title, Conan holding the sceptre that encases the 530 Doyle says with typical theatricality: carat Star of Africa. ‘Holmes took up the stone and held it against the light. To me, the fascinating aspect of famous “It’s a bonny thing,” said he. “Just see how it glints stones is how history seems to madly swirl and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil’s pet around them, while they themselves do not baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may deteriorate. Many are a thousand or more stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty years old, their histories shrouded in legend. years old. It was found in the banks of the Amoy River Many carry curses, though given the extreme in southern China and is remarkable in having every lives of their owners, it's hardly surprising characteristic of the carbuncle. In spite of its youth, it that the curses seem to come true. It was has already a sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and several very interesting to see the reaction to robberies brought about for the sake of this forty- Catherine Middleton being given the grain weight of crystallised charcoal. Who would engagement ring of Princess Diana, some Judith Bingham think that so pretty a toy would be a purveyor to the people genuinely horrified. (Photographer: Patrick Douglas Hamilton) gallows and the prison?’ Famous stones come to represent qualities of the human race, accrued during their long photographs of Victorian actors, frozen in histories. That made me think that you could expressive poses. The sequence of regal create an imaginary crown which contained qualities that follows is divinity, the god- six famous stones, each of which would king, then loneliness and vulnerability. In represent a quality of monarchy, good or this, La Pelegrina, a young princess is kept bad. Then you have to think – who would locked up by one of the Hapsburgs – she the monarch be? And who would crown dances a Pavane by herself. At the end of them? this movement there is a segue into a creepier, darker mood – excessive ambition Setting out to write a 35 minute piece, I knew as presented by Count Orlov, who went that I wanted to make the work a moveable insane in his efforts to win back the favours feast, so that movements could be done of Catherine the Great with a great diamond. separately or in twos or threes. I wanted Another segue continues the Russian theme some movements to be much harder than with the great Chinese spinel from the others – ‘King Edward’s Sapphire’ is possibly Russian Imperial Crown, representing murder. the easiest, whereas ‘The Russian Spinel’ I was extremely inspired by Yakov Yurovsky’s requires a more developed technique. I account of the murder of the Romanovs, wanted to present different eras of playing – the women in the family ‘armoured’ with ‘La Pelegrina’ is only on two manuals, as if corsets of diamonds and pearls. Then, in a it were being played in a domestic setting. movement representing piety and sanctity, The opening and closing movements are King Edward the Confessor encounters St very grand however, and need a big space. John the Baptist in the guise of a beggar And I wanted to give the piece an overall and gives him a sapphire. Astonishingly, feel of a dance suite once the grandeur this jewel is still in the royal collection. And of the opening – the ouverture – is over. finally, the Indian connection, with the Timur ruby, and the Peacock Throne, The piece opens with a coronation scene, representing conquest and spectacle. gothic, gestural, presenting a pedal motif The Koh-i-Noor diamond with its heavy in the shape of a crown. This movement curse, beckons in a glittering roulade of immediately introduces melodrama into notes. the piece and I constantly visualised the Stephen Farr different stories as scenes from expressionist © 2012 Judith Bingham movies like The Scarlet Empress or old ‘Farr’s playing is always alert to the textural nuances [...] thoroughly enthralling’ BBC Music Magazine The Everlasting Crown (2010) autumnal migration of Siberian swans to the core idea for The Everlasting Crown.” moments that you see in Expressionism. I Judith Bingham British Isles, those harbingers of change and tried to find and develop big musical gestures emblems of timelessness enshrined in the Bingham’s seven-movement work, in The Everlasting Crown. I certainly thought History has an irresistible habit of overtaking verse of W.B. Yeats and woven into the aural commissioned in memory of Edward Griffiths of the sense of the Albert Hall organ opening those with delusions of immortality. The metaphor of Bingham’s brass tone-poem. (1988-2006), was first performed by Stephen up and of the space in which it sounds ruins of mighty empires tell the tale of “These birds have travelled back and forth Farr at London’s Royal Albert Hall on 17 July when writing the piece. The instrument’s power held and lost: Timur’s fearful Samark for millennia,” she observes. “Even though 2011. Stephen returned to the work a month sheer power and visceral quality were and the cities of the Incas, the remnants they are moving, even though swans die, after its premiere, recording it on the recently valuable to a melodramatic work. I'd really of Spain’s colonial adventure in the Americas their collective journey remains a constant renovated Harrison & Harrison organ in St love to hear The Everlasting Crown played and Soviet-era missile bunkers stand amid around which swirls human history, that Albans Cathedral. The composer notes that the on one of those massive American organs.” the vast, ever-growing wreckage, beneath which seems so important in its time yet Royal Albert Hall’s ‘Father’ Willis-cum-Harrison which countless souls lie buried. The can be forgotten within a generation. The grand organ, for all its quirks, offered the The composer’s sketches for The Everlasting Everlasting Crown, like ‘the angel of history, people beneath their flight path come and indulgence of a 64-foot acoustic bass stop, Crown, begun in August 2010, reveal her deals with the transience of human existence. go, yet the swans are permanent: there is beautiful gamba, baryton and cello stops and work’s thematic integrity and chart its Unlike Walter Benjamin’s apocalyptic thesis something mystical about this great an almighty full sound. The instrument multi-faceted development from the gravid on the philosophy of history, Judith Bingham’s procession.” certainly satisfied Bingham’s desire to write material of three distinct ideas. The pedal multi-faceted organ composition delivers what she describes as a ‘melodramatic’ organ announces the first of these, a ground a consoling counterforce rooted in Gemstones and their obdurate qualities piece, one influenced by the lore and legend bass-like motif marked (but not marred) constancy and changelessness. suggested fresh perspectives for Bingham of jewels; the self-reflection and spectacle by its tritones. The second motif, a close to occupy in her creative response to human of Expressionist cinema; silver-print relative of the first, soon asserts its striking The composer found the ideational key to memory, its fragility and the impermanence photographs of doomed monarchs, and the independence as the opening movement’s her work in the enduring material and of our being.