SOLO MUSIC FOR TRUMPET
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SOLO MUSIC FOR TRUMPET MARKO’KEEFFE KNIGHTERRANT
1. Eddie McGuire (b. 1948) Prelude 22 (The Big Bang)[8:16]
2. John Maxwell Geddes (b. 1941) The Trouble with Tritons • • [5:37]
3. John Maxwell GeddesKnight Errant • • [1:53]
4. John Maxwell GeddesVelvet Rooms • • [6:10]
5. Rory Boyle (b.1951) Ceremony After A Fire Raid * • • [13:45]
Peter Maxwell Davies (b.1934) Litany for a ruined chapel between sheep and shore
6. Adagio recitando – Allegro[5:44]
7. Lento – attacca –[2:38]
8. Presto vigoroso[2:43]
9. John Maxwell GeddesResident Villain, or The Reform [5:54] of Rank Bajin • •
10. John Maxwell GeddesEtude d’éxécution transcendante • [6:02]
11. John Maxwell GeddesMuse Lane • • [4:07]
12. William Sweeney (b. 1950) Paraphrase on ‘Pro Patria’ • [13:13]
13. Mark-Anthony Turnage (b.1960) An Aria (with dancing)[3:47]
Total playing time[79:59]
* Annique Burms mezzo-soprano
Tracks 2, 3, 4, 9 and 11 are part of Compendium for solo trumpet
All first recordings except tracks 6-8
Giles Swayne: Convocation
The National Youth Choir of Great Britain; Laudibus Mike Brewer, conductor; Michael Bonaventure, organ Stephen Wallace, counter-tenor DCD34033
When a powerful team of new music exponents come together, magic will happen; when the music is by Giles Swayne, a composer whose light shines brilliantly in its own unique direction, the results will entrance. This disc offers a bracing sonic experience - vividly communicative music performed with rare verve, passion, and youthful vibrancy.
‘Swayne is a master’ – The Independent
Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano Nancy Ruffer, flute and piccolo; Abigail James, guitar Dominic Saunders, piano DCD34029
Over the past 40 years, Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award Winner and Creative Scotland Award Winner, has developed a compositional style that is as diverse as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments, flute, guitar, and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad of folk influences. At once bold and playful, the listener cannot help be drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world.
‘this is quite simply beautiful music ... Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on.’ – Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Awards issue 2006
Commissioned with the financial assistance of • the Scottish Arts Council • and the Hope Scott TrustNew music on Delphian
The Cold Dancer: Contemporary String Quartets From Scotland
Edinburgh Quartet DCD34038
Rich and personal contributions to the quartet tradition from four contemporary Scottish composing voices, ranging from the lyrical profundity of Kenneth Dempster’s meditation on a George Mackay Brown poem to a characteristically idiosyncratic and yet songful work by Judith Weir. Under their new leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet deliver blazing, committed performances celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.
‘a bright sound with a ring of steel around it that is ideal for modern music’
– Daily Telegraph
2000 Nails
Michael Bonaventure, Organ DCD34013
Bonaventure, virtuosic proponent of new music for the organ, presents here a luminous recital of première recordings, a rare invitation into this phantasmagorical sound world.
‘Bonaventure commissioned all of these works and he is a thoroughly convincing advocate. His registrations combine colour with clarity, captured in atmospheric sound’
– BBC Music Magazine, September 2005
Knight Errant: music for solo trumpet
Are you ready? Are you listening? Mark O’Keeffe, trumpeter extraordinaire, would like to play for you. Like a wandering minstrel or – as in the title of one of the pieces here – a knight errant, this modern virtuoso undertakes a journey to entertain you and a voyage to prove himself. Sometimes, it seems, he is merely showing off, in pure display with no other object (tilting at windmills, to adopt knightly parlance). At other times the obstacles he has to overcome are real,and substantial. At several points he is joined by a companion on the road, to lend assistance or perhaps just to fill in the scenery. Sometimes he is alone, but rarely for long: he is a past master at dreaming up company for himself, and even when he doesn’t … well, after all, you are there. Listening. Watching, even, with your mind’s eye. Answering back? That’s up to you.
The journey starts, appropriately enough, with a very well-known beginning indeed: the beginning of the universe, or at least one theory of how we began. Eddie McGuire’s Prelude 22 (The Big Bang) is the most recent in the series of solo Preludes McGuire began in 1975, and in which he intends eventually to include a work for every instrument. The solo trumpet work shares its astronomical subject matter with McGuire’s Orbit for trumpet duo, Five Stars in Auriga for brass quintet and Earthrise for brass band. Out of
chaos, concrete musical images solidify, at first as fragments: a slow reel, a jig, a polka. These dances represent the entry of life into the universe, and in extending the fragments into complete performances the trumpeter seems to find his own place on Earth, to become an actor rather than a narrator. Finally, somewhat breathless after his exertions but delighted that you stayed to listen, O’Keeffe addresses to you a few words in his own language, Irish Gaelic. ‘Go raibh math agait,’ he says: ‘thank you very much!’
Prelude 22, like most of the pieces brought together here, was premiered by Mark O’Keeffe, and appears specially tailored to his dramatic capabilities as well as to his virtuosic musicianship. Those not written for O’Keeffe were, with one exception (John Maxwell Geddes’ Etude d’éxécution transcendante), composed for his teacher and mentor John Wallace, who has passed on to his protégé the mantle of virtuosity as well as setting an example of passionate commitment to promoting new work. Even Geddes’ etude, the oldest work on the disc, is only twelve years old; none of these pieces would have been imaginable more than twenty or thirty years ago, since which time advances in technical construction and performing technique have expanded the instrument’s repertory almost beyond recognition. But the idea of a display piece
for a solo instrumentalist is much older, and in that sense all of the music on this recording draws on a distinguished history.
How does a composer make music out of a single line of notes, a sequence of sounds to be performed on an instrument which (unlike, say, a piano) can only play one note at a time? More often than one might expect, the answer has to do with counterpoint: with the simultaneity of different lines. At its simplest, counterpoint suggests two melodies sung or played in harmonious combination. Composers from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth were much occupied with the art of combining such lines, and when Baroque composers such as Bach and Telemann began to write music for solo flute, violin or cello the distribution of high and low notes often produced the illusion of distinct but intertwining strands in music played by a single instrument. Today, with its vastly expanded range and flexibility, a solo trumpet can do something similar. Today, too, the more familiar patterns and gestures of Baroque trumpet music may be just one of the elements which a new piece evokes. Music can be a polyphony of so many different things, and counterpoint is music’s third dimension, opening it up to the past as well as to other presents. You are not alone, it says. In life, as in music, someone is talking or singing and someone else is listening.
In John Maxwell Geddes’Sometimes two people, or creatures, are arguing, and this too can be evoked in performance.
‘The Trouble with Tritons’, the solo trumpeter is both Triton and horse, and in its rapid switching between the two identities the piece makes a modern and very un-abstract parallel to Bachian linear counterpoint. ‘The Tritons,’ Geddes explains, were Charioteers of Poseidon. The trouble with Tritons is that they can be very bad-tempered. Here, a solitary Triton struggles to control rearing horses on the pediment of the Clydeport Building, Broomielaw, Glasgow; a conch shell summons the horses. Some angry exchanges between Triton and horses ensue, followed by a quotation from the ancient Cantus Neptunius ‘Bullae semper anhelo’, and the work ends with a furious Triton venting his anger in a virtuosic display of Atlantean proportions.
‘Knight Errant’ is calmer, statelier. The knight is St George, depicted in sandstone by J.&G. Mossman in 1897. This dramatic sculpture group, St George and the Dragon, was for many years prominent, high on the Co-op building in St George’s Road, and ‘errant’ refers to its having been moved in 1988 to ground level at St George’s Cross, sixty feet down. But the pigeons still congregate around the statue, and can be heard intermittently in the background here.
by them in 1998, as well as on Àirc an dualchais (Inheritance Ark), commissioned for the opening of the Museum of Scotland in November 1998, and Na thàinig anna a churach ud (All that came in that one coracle), commissioned for the opening of the new campus for the Gaelic College on Skye in1999.
Recent works include String Quartet No3 (recorded by the Edinburgh Quartet on Delphian, DCD34038), The Poet Tells of His Fame for solo cello and electronics, a song cycle for tenor and harp based on poetry in Scots by Robert Fergusson, and Pro Patria, a setting of words by the 16th-century Scottish scholar and poet, George Buchanan. In 2005, Sweeney was the recipient of a Creative Scotland Award to create a work exploring the sensibility of Scottish musicians of the 1960s who defined their identity through the music of Black America. Combining live performance and electroacoustics, the project will involve collaboration with internationally recognised blues harmonica player Fraser Spiers and technical advice and guidance from electroacoustic expert Nick Fells.
Sweeney is currently Head of the Department of Music at the University of Glasgow.
Born in Britain in 1960, Mark-Anthony Turnage studied with Oliver Knussen, John Lambert and Gunther Schuller before coming to international attention with his first opera Greek, premiered at the Munich Biennale in 1988, and with a series of works written as Composer-in-Association with the CBSO and Sir Simon Rattle between 1989 and 1993 – Three Screaming Popes, Kai, Momentum and Drowned Out. Three years later, Blood on the Floor, an Ensemble Modern commission for John Scofield, Peter Erskine and Martin Robertson, sealed his reputation as a composer able to reflect the realities of modern life in an idiom inflected by his deep love of jazz and by his interest in close collaboration with particular performers.
The new century brought important appointments with the BBC Symphony and London Philharmonic Orchestras, as well as commissions and performances from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. The trumpet concerto From the Wreckage was written for soloist Håkan Hardenberger, who after its Helsinki premiere brought it to the 2005 Proms. Turnage has recently been appointed Mead Composer in Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 2006–2008.
Biographies
compositional efforts on chamber music, and is nearing completion of a cycle of ten string quartets, commissioned by the Naxos record label and launched and performed in its entirety at the Wigmore Hall, London by the Maggini Quartet over a period of five years.
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music in March 2004.
operas included in his output. In 2003 he took up a three-year appointment as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Composer Laureate for schools and in 2006 he won a Creative Scotland Award to write an opera with the librettist Dilys Rose on the subject of the 18th-century feral child Kaspar Hauser. He lives in South Ayrshire and divides his time between composing and teaching at the RSAMD in Glasgow.
Rory Boyle was born in Ayr. He was a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and studied composition with Frank Spedding at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as well as piano, organ, clarinet and conducting. A Caird Travelling Scholarship enabled him to continue his studies with Lennox Berkeley in London. He has won several important awards including the BBC Scottish Composers Prize and the Zaiks Prize for his orchestral score Winter Music which was premiered in Cracow, Poland. He has been commissioned by many festivals, societies and by leading performers including Nicholas Daniel, Evelyn Glennie, Mark O’Keeffe, the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble and the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, and he has also written extensively for younger players, with four children’s
William Sweeney was born in Glasgow in 1950 and educated at Knightswood Secondary School, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Music. His output covers a wide range of instrumental, orchestral, electronic and vocal forces, in genres ranging from concert works through music for theatre, dance, movement, film and television and including a number of works designed for use in music in education. His incidental music for the film
An Iobairt (The Sacrifice) won the Scottish BAFTA Award for Best Music in 1997, and he collaborated again with Aonghas MacNeacail, scriptwriter on that film, on the opera An Turus (The Journey), commissioned by the Paragon Ensemble and premiered
Both works form part of an ongoing collection of solo trumpet pieces by Geddes: there are five to date, written for Mark O’Keeffe and premiered between 2003 and 2005, often in the locations depicted. Taking a tour around Glasgow’s statues and architecture, Compendium is a journey of the imagination. In what Geddes’ own imagination has done with the statues and locations, it is also a collection of short stories. The trumpeter is the teller, and you are the audience: counterpoint again. Towards the end of ‘Velvet Rooms’, the counterpoint is supplied by the listener’s memory, the empty space around the high staccato A’s from the opening altered and enriched in the imagination by the intervening content. Again, the composer offers a suggestive scenario:
The Velvet Rooms 1897–8 (originally a piano warehouse, then a disco, now a club) are situated at 520 Sauchiehall St. At the rear entrance (341 Renfrew St) there is a colossal bust of Beethoven in red sandstone. One wet winter morning, rain formed rivulets on his noble Romantic brow, and dripped from his great red sandstone nose …
The alert listener may wonder if it is not Beethoven himself who sings, or at least the trumpet remembering a certain famous Beethovenian symphonic movement…But to achieve this Geddes needs to make use of counterpoint in the most traditional sense
– in the way single notes, like raindrops, gradually coalesce into streams, so that in the main part of the piece those high A’s are heard as accompaniment to a low cantabile melody which is itself composed of two or three strands.
This kind of counterpoint is also the basis of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s short An Aria (with dancing), where it operates on two levels. First of all, the ‘aria’ itself makes a melody out of broken chordal patterns. It is followed by a contrasted section marked ‘dance’. Then the two are intercut, the legato of the aria counterpointing the staccato of the dance, before a coda in which the trumpeter produces complex timbres by humming and playing at the same time.
Peter Maxwell Davies’ Litany for a ruined chapel between sheep and shore is at once the most sustained display of virtuosity and, paradoxically, the stillest piece on this disc. The title suggests a prayer, but a prayer rooted in the landscape (of Davies’ Orkney home, perhaps), and the sublimated dance-forms of the work’s three-movement sonata structure contain a stillness within even their most complexly elaborated rhythmic patterns. It is as if the music, outwardly effortful, were striving towards grace, and listeners familiar with Davies’ earlier Trumpet Concerto – where the soloist represents St Francis – may imagine the present piece to be recreating the same role in miniature.
Prayer of a different sort haunts Rory Boyle’s Ceremony After A Fire Raid. Musical lines and figures are shared between the trumpet and a soprano, who joins him here to sing the text of Dylan Thomas’ meditation on the death of a child in wartime. The setting follows the poem’s structure and matches its crescendo of intensity, the expressive extremes of its agonised invocation of religious imagery and symbol, which here provides little comfort but registers the impossible, vivid reality of an event which is more than ordinary language can comprehend. The glissandi which pervade both played and sung parts recall both the sirens of the raid and the stricken cry of the poem’s response, allowing the trumpet to ‘speak’ as emotionally, if unconsolably, as the soprano: the two performers united in grief.
The trumpeter becomes an actor again in ‘Resident Villain’, the next piece to be heard from John Maxwell Geddes’ Compendium suite. This time the inspiration is a statue opposite the Halt Bar in Woodlands Road, and the piece pays homage to the Glasgow cartoonist Bud Neill (1911–70), creator of the three figures depicted: Lobey Dosser, Sheriff of Calton Creek; his horse, El Fideldo; and the necessary ingredient of any Western scenario, the villain, Rank Bajin. Offstage, the statue comes to life to a motif from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The black-clad Rank Bajin enters the bar and serenades the customers,
menacingly but intimately, the trumpet imitating his guitar as he approaches the members of the audience one by one.The villain departs, repentant for his evil deeds …
In Etude d’éxécution transcendante, the character is himself a trumpeter, and his appointed task seems to involve a performance of Handel’s Messiah. He begins an impressive rendition of his part, but soon notices a bottle of whisky and large tumbler. He crosses the stage and pours a small measure; he drinks, and pours a little more. His playing is now alternately casual and brilliant, but he is repeatedly distracted by the whisky. He attempts his part again, stops to examine his instrument, and shrugs. He uses the tumbler as a mute, but he is now suffering an attack of hiccups. He drinks out of the wrong side of the glass as a cure, and again is able to show off his virtuoso technique – even if, by the end of the piece, Handel is largely forgotten.
‘Muse Lane’ returns to Compendium’s layering of memories and history, though here with a nostalgic, personal twist: the lane of the title, now a faded street sign in the Cowcaddens district of Glasgow, was a century ago the location of many pubs and music halls, as well as the home of the composer’s grandfather Jack Hugo, entertainer, ‘eccentric comedian’ and
John Maxwell Geddes (b. 1941 in Glasgow) studied at the RSAMD and the Royal Danish Conservatoire. His works include 3 symphonies, many orchestral and chamber pieces, choral works, folk song settings and film scores. Often informed by his interest in history, archaeology, astronomy and science fiction, they include Lacuna (1977), Leo, dreaming … (1988) and the highly successful Voyager (1985), a BBC commission for European Music Year. These and other works have been performed at prestigious venues such as the London Proms, Warsaw Autumn, St Petersburg, Sholokov, Don Spring, Xenakis, Prokofiev and Edinburgh festivals and Berlin Sommerfest.
He has lectured in many American universities and numerous European academies, including the Meistersingerkonservatorium, Nuremberg, Hochschule in Freiburg and Stuttgart, the Rachmaninoff Conservatoire in Rostov on Don and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Awards include the Goethe Institut Award 1986, PRS Composer in Education Award 1991, the Lord Provost of Glasgow’s Commendation 2002, and a Fellowship of the RSAMD in 2003.
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies lives in the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, where he writes most of his music. He has composed across the widest gamut of musical genres, and in many styles. The power to communicate forcefully and directly with his audiences manifests itself equally in his profoundly argued symphonic works, in the delightful music-theatre works designed to be performed by non-specialist children and in his sometimes outrageous witty light orchestral works. He is also active as a conductor and has held associate posts with many orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he is Composer Laureate.
Davies’ major theatrical works include the operas Tavener, Resurrection, The Lighthouse and The Doctor of Myddfai, the full-length ballets Salome and Caroline Mathilde, and the music-theatre works Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot. His huge output of orchestral works includes fourteen concertos, five large-scale works for chorus including the oratorio Job, and eight symphonies, hailed by The Times as ‘the most important symphonic cycle since Shostakovich’. He is now concentrating his
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Biographies
tour with Scottish Ballet for a newlycomposed ballet by Christopher Benstead. In the Netherlands, she premiered Sweetheart Come, a new opera by Mariecke van der Linden, at the Seeland Festival. Recent and future engagements include Stravinsky’s Les Noces for Walpurgis Antwerpen, Heliogabal by Peter Vermeersch for Het Toneelhuis Antwerpen, and Preziozilla in Verdi’s La forza del destino (Tilburg, the Netherlands).
Eddie McGuire was born in Glasgow in 1948 and studied composition with James Iliff at the Royal Academy of Music, London between 1966 and 1970 and subsequently with the Swedish composer Ingvar Lidholm in Stockholm. McGuire’s works are regularly broadcast and performed all over the world, and he has received commissions from the Cheltenham Festival, Park Lane Young Artists’ Series, New Music Group of Scotland, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, St Magnus Festival and Edinburgh International Festival.
In recent years McGuire has produced several large-scale works to critical acclaim: A Glasgow Symphony; the three-act ballet Peter Pan, which has been performed over 120 times by Scottish Ballet and Hong Kong Ballet; and two operas, Cake Talk (1996) for the RSNO Junior Chorus and The Loving of Etain for Paragon Opera (both with the librettist Marianne Carey). He has also written concertos for guitar, trombone, viola, violin and – most recently – double bass, the latter being broadcast by the BBC SSO with soloist Anthony Alcock. His symphonic poem featuring bagpipes, Calgacus, was recorded by the BBC SSO during the 1997 BBC Proms, and featured on the front cover disc of BBC Music Magazine, entitled ‘The Very Best of the BBC Orchestras’.
Eddie also plays flute with, and writes for, the traditional music ensemble The Whistlebinkies, and has appeared on several recordings with them on the Greentrax label. Among his interests as a political activist, he has been Chair of the Scottish region of the Musicians Union since 2003. He was the recipient of a British Composer Award in 2003 and, in 2004, of a Creative Scotland Award. A CD of music for flute, guitar and piano was released on Delphian in 2006 (DCD34029).
socialist. His signature tune is heard in the distance, and recalled haltingly by the trumpet.
And themes of history and memory again underlie William Sweeney’s Paraphrase on ‘Pro Patria’, where the trumpet seems often sombre and reflective in its recollection of the piece for chorus and strings on which Paraphrase is based. Elsewhere, the instrument recalls its own past in sharply etched fanfares, but these also are not idly militaristic. ‘Despite their antiquity,’ Sweeney writes of the texts set in Pro Patria, ‘they seemed to have resonance for events of the early twenty-first century.’ They are Latin poems by the Scottish writer, historian and political theorist George Buchanan (1506–1582), and two of them present the legendary figure of Codrus, the last King
of Athens, contrasting his selfless patriotism with the actions of a later and perhaps more familiar type of leader:
On his country’s behalf [pro patria] Codrus hurls himself on the foe’s drawn swords, Against his country’s peace Caesar brought flames and the weapons of war.
Caesar, too, might have argued he was acting in the interests of his country, but in the quiet songfulness with which Paraphrase closes – a sort of alert communion between player and listener – the music speaks eloquently for peace.
© 2007 John Fallas
John Fallas is a freelance writer and commentator on contemporary music.
Recorded on 22 August 2005 and 1, 2 & 4 May 2006, in Paisley Abbey, Scotland.
Producer: Paul Baxter
Engineers: Adam Binks, David Strudwick
24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Design: John Christ Session photography: Delphian Records
Photograph editing:
Dr Raymond Parks
Cover and inlay images:
Maria Verdicchio
Made and printed in the EU
© Delphian Records Ltd
Delphian Records Ltd
With thanks to: Sue Don and George McPhee at Paisley Abbey; Gabriel Jackson; John Wallace.
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Ceremony after a fire raid
Dylan Thomas
IMyselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the streets burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth Charred on the black breast of the grave The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.
Begin With singing Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning When the caught tongue nodded blind, A star was broken Into the centuries of the child Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.
Forgive Us forgive Give
Us your death that myselves the believers May hold it in a great flood Till the blood shall spurt, And the dust shall sing like a bird As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.
Crying Your dying
Biographies
Creative Scotland winner 2003 Mark O’Keeffe has held the post of principal trumpet with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra since December 1996. He is a native of County Cork, Ireland, where he began his musical studies at the age of seven. His love of the trumpet developed after playing in the local brass band and receiving trumpet lessons from his father. He took formal lessons at the Cork School of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music, and was chosen in 1992 as the winner of the RTE Musician of the Future competition. On his return to Ireland later that year, he was appointed associate principal trumpet of the National Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for four years.
Over the past ten years he has appeared as soloist with the BBC SSO on a number of occasions, performing new works by Judith Bingham, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Thea Musgrave and Tansy Davies as well as concertos by Telemann, Hummel and Shostakovich. Mark has recently commissioned new solo trumpet works by Scottish composers John Maxwell Geddes, Jennifer Martin and Anthea Haddow. In addition to his career with the BBC SSO, he is a committed chamber musician playing in several ensembles that share his passion for performing new music. His teachers have included Murray Greig, John Wallace and Bo Nilsson.
Mark O’Keeffe teaches at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, where he completed, with distinction, a master’s degree in trumpet performance.
Mezzo-soprano Annique
Burms was born and educated in Belgium (Ghent), and continued her singing education at the RSAMD’s Alexander Gibson Opera School, Glasgow, gaining an MMus and MMus (Opera) under Jane Irwin (2000-2002). After a year of Advanced Continuing Education in Opera, she still works with her teacher Jane Irwin and with Pat MacMahon.
She enjoys performing both classic opera and contemporary music. For the Scottish contemporary music ensemble Paragon, she sang M is for Man, Music, Mozart by Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway and created two new chamber operas: Descent by Gordon McPherson and The Answer Machine by David Fennessy, conducted by Garry Walker. For the Academy Now Festival in Glasgow she performed in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Twice through the Heart. For the West End Festival in Glasgow, she took the lead role in Bizet’s Carmen, and she twice undertook a
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Cry, Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed Street we chant the flying sea
In the body bereft. Love is the last light spoken. Oh Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.
II
I know not whether Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock Or the white ewe lamb
Or the chosen virgin Laid in her snow
On the altar of London, Was the first to die
In the cinder of the little skull, O bride and bride groom O Adam and Eve together
Lying in the lull
Under the sad breast of the head stone
White as the skeleton
Of the garden of Eden.
I know the legend
Of Adam and Eve is never for a second Silent in my service
Over the dead infants
Over the one
Child who was priest and servants, Word, singers, and tongue
In the cinder of the little skull, Who was the serpent’s
Night fall and the fruit like a sun, Man and woman undone, Beginning crumbled back to darkness
Bare as the nurseries
Of the garden of wilderness.
III
Into the organpipes and steeples
Of the luminous cathedrals, Into the weathercocks’ molten mouths
Rippling in twelve-winded circles, Into the dead clock burning the hour
Over the urn of sabbaths
Over the whirling ditch of daybreak
Over the sun’s hovel and the slum of fire
And the golden pavements laid in requiems, Into the cauldrons of the statuary, Into the bread in a wheatfield of flames, Into the wine burning like brandy, The masses of the sea
The masses of the sea under The masses of the infant-bearing sea
Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever
Glory glory glory
The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.
(May 1944)
Courtesy of Stephen Duffy From DylanThomas: Collected Poems 1934-52 (J.M. Dent & Sons), by kind permission Far left: Eddie McGuire during recording sessions with MarkO’Keeffe Left: Composer John Maxwell Geddes sets the scene for Muse Lane Right: John Maxwell Geddes and engineer Adam Binks during sessions Bottom right: MarkO’Keeffe and Annique Burms