Gordon Crosse

SRCD.313 STEREO ADD Gordon Crosse GORDON CROSSE (b. 1937) Purgatory (1966) Opera in One Act 1 Introduction - “Half-door, hall door” (3’47”) Purgatory 2 “So you have come this path before?” (4’38”) 3 “But there are some Who do not care…” (3’05”) 4 “My mother that was your grand-dam owned it” (4’57”) 5 “My God, but you had luck!” (3’26”) 6 “I stuck him with a knife” (6’29”) 7 “Deaf! Both deaf!” (5’11”) 8 “My father and my son on the same jack-knife!” (7’57”) (39’34”) Peter Bodenham, tenor • Glenville Hargreaves, baritone Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Northern College of Music conducted by Michael Lankester The above individual timings will normally each include two pauses. One before the beginning of each movement or work, and one after the end. ൿ 1975 The copyright in this sound recording is owned by Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Peter Bodenham • Glenville Hargreaves This compilation and the digital remastering ൿ 2008 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. © 2008 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Lyrita is a registered trade mark. Made in the UK Orchestra & Chorus of the Royal Northern College of Music LYRITA RECORDED EDITION. Produced under an exclusive license from Lyrita by Wyastone Estate Ltd, PO Box 87, Monmouth, NP25 3WX, UK Conducted by Michael Lankester PURGATORY Opera in One Act Libretto by GORDON CROSSE www.lyrita.co.uk Adapted from the play by W B Yeats Notes ©2008 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England Music by Cover: Photograph from the inaugural production of the Royal Northern College of Music Opera Theatre, Manchester, 20 February 1973. Copyright Photocall, Manchester, courtesy of Opera GORDON CROSSE Magazine Ltd. PERSONS IN THE OPERA The original analogue recording of PURGATORY was made in association with the BRITISH COUNCIL and first issued on LP Argo ZRG 810 in 1975. A BOY : Peter Bodenham, tenor The words of PURGATORY are set to music and reproduced by permission of AP WATT on behalf of An OLD MAN : Glenville Hargreaves, baritone GráinneYeats. Purgatory Orchestra and Chorus of the Recording location and date: February & August 1974, Royal Northern College of Music , Manchester. Royal Northern College of Music Recording Producer: James Burnett Recording Engineer: Michael Mailes & Malcolm Hogg conducted by Michael Lankester Digital Remastering Engineer: Simon Gibson This recording based on a production by James Maxwell for the Other works by GORDON CROSSE available on Lyrita: Ariadne : Sarah Francis, LSO Ensemble, Michael Lankester Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester 1973. Changes : Jennifer Vyvyan, John Shirley-Quirk, LSO Orchestra & Chorus, Norman Del Mar…………………………………………………………………………………………SRCD. 259 WARNING Copyright subsists in all Lyrita Recordings. Any unauthorised broadcasting. public performance, copying, rental or re-recording thereof in any manner whatsoever will constitute an infringement of such copyright. In the United Kingdom licences for the use of recordings for public performance may be obtained from Phonographic Performance Ltd., 1 Upper James Street, London, W1F 9DE 2 15 he premiere of Gordon Crosse’s Purgatory at the 1966 Cheltenham International Festival Study that tree! Twas perhaps the event which so enhanced the 29-year-old composer’s growing reputation It stands there like a purified soul, that he was recognized as one of the leading figures in the new British music currently being All cold, sweet, and glistening light. written by his contemporaries Nicholas Maw, Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Dear mother, the window is dark again, Harrison Birtwistle and Richard Rodney Bennett. He had already attracted attention with But you are in the light because the orchestral song-cycle For the Unfallen (1963); the entertainment Meet My Folks! for I finished all that consequence. amateur and professional performers was a hit of the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, and also I killed that lad because he had grown up marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with the poet Ted Hughes which resulted in he would have struck a woman’s fancy. several subsequent vocal works and song cycles. With the ‘nocturnal cycle’ Changes for Begot, and passed pollution on. amateur and semi-professional chorus and orchestra (1965-66) Crosse also made his mark in I am a wretched old man the hallowed naves of the Three Choirs Festival. But Purgatory was his real breakthrough And therefore harmless. When I have stuck piece: based upon a stark late drama by W. B. Yeats, it communicated with an undeniable This old jack-knife into a sod immediacy and intensity that remains palpable more than 40 years since that first And pulled it out all bright again, performance. It is, in fact, one of the most powerful British music-theatre works of its period. I’ll to a distant place and there Crosse was born in Bury, Lancashire in 1937. After graduating with first class honours I’ll tell my old jokes among new men. from Oxford University he spent two years researching 15 th -century music; part of that time (He cleans the knife and begins to pick up the money) he spent in Rome studying with Goffredo Petrassi, the Italian master who taught so many distinguished composers (including Kenneth Leighton and Peter Maxwell Davies among Hoof-beats! Dear God, Crosse’s British contemporaries). From 1964 onwards Crosse held various teaching How quickly it returns – beat – beat - ! appointments including at the Universities of Birmingham and Essex, and was for two years Her mind cannot hold up that dream Composer-in-Residence at King’s College, Cambridge. He eventually settled in Suffolk and in Twice a murderer and all for nothing, 1976, the year in which he won the Cobbett Medal, gave up teaching to devote all his time to And she must animate that dead night composition, except for one year that he spent as visiting professor in composition at the Not once but many times. University of California. Crosse’s output spans a number of genres, but much of it reflects his wide and finely Oh God, discriminating literary interests and his concern with drama, both in the theatre and in Release my mother ’s soul from its dream! sheerly instrumental terms. He has received commissions from many orchestras, festivals Mankind can do no more. Appease and other organizations both in the UK and internationally. Purgatory was followed by a The misery of the living and the remorse of the dead. further four operas: a further one-acter, The Grace of Todd (1967), to a libretto by David Rudkin, the three-act The Story of Vasco (1968-73), with a libretto by Ted Hughes, premièred THE END at the London Coliseum, Potter Thompson (1972-3), the nativity opera for children Holly from the Bongs (1973), to a libretto by Alan Garner, and the ‘entertainment’ Wheel of the World (1969-72). Other notable works in Crosse’s output include the monodrama Memories of Morning: Night (1971), for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, based on Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea dramatizing the interior monologues of the first Mrs Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and World Within (1976) for actress, soprano and ten players, with a text 14 3 taken from the writings of Emily Brontë. Purely orchestral works include Ceremony for cello OLD MAN (Staring at the window) Better looking, those sixteen years - and orchestra (also inspired by W. B. Yeats), Epiphany Variations, Dreamsongs, two BOY What are you muttering? symphonies, two violin concertos and a Cello Concerto (1979) dedicated to the memory of OLD MAN Younger - and yet Luigi Dallapiccola. She should have known he was not her kind. There are also a number of Concertantes for solo instrument and ensemble, starting with Ariadne for oboe and orchestra, dramatizing the polarity of solo and collective; and also BOY What are you saying? Out with it! Play Ground, later choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan and performed by Sadlers Wells (OLD MAN points to the window) Royal Ballet at the Edinburgh Festival in 1979. This collaboration between composer and choreographer continued in 1981 with The Wild Boy, a ballet by MacMillan to Crosse’s My God! The window is lit up Concertante for clarinet and eight players, written in 1978. In 1984, at the request of the And someone stands there, although choreographer David Bintley, Cross extended Benjamin Britten’s short work for piano and The floorboards are all burnt away. strings, Young Apollo, to a suitable length for a ballet. This was first performed in November OLD MAN The window is lit because my father of that year in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Crosse also wrote some striking music Has come to find a glass for his whiskey. for television, including a baleful organ passacaglia for David Rudkin’s esoteric drama He leans there like some tired beast. Artemis ’81 and a striking score for Lawrence Olivier’s King Lear (1983). In 1988 Crosse’s Oboe Quintet was premiered by the Nash Ensemble and in 1990 Sea BOY A dead, living, murdered, man! Psalms was given its first performance by the Scottish National Chorus and Orchestra in A body that was a bundle of old bones Glasgow. It was at this period, however, that Crosse found himself in need of a more secure Before I was born. Horrible! Horrible! life than was offered by the career of free-lance composer and became instead, in 1990, a full- time computer programmer. ‘One cannot (I cannot) just start composing again when there is (He covers his eyes) no extended period of time to dream, so everything lapsed’ he recently explained. ‘Now I am OLD MAN That beast there would know nothing being nothing, completely retired I am trying to get my mind thinking in musical terms again …’ Certainly If I should kill a man under the window his virtual absence from the concert scene for the past 20 years is a matter for keen regret He would not even turn his head.

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