I first heard Christopher Fry's radio play One Thing More on the BBC one Sunday afternoon just as discussions had begun with colleagues at the Royal Opera House as to how we might go about instigating performances of new works. I felt that this play, with its heightened prose and poetic emotions, would make an ideal chamber opera and when the Garden Venture was launched I was commissioned to complete it. Why the Garden Venture didn't become the great success it deserved to be is beyond my comprehension; but that's another story....

So Fry's play became my Caedmon and one or two critics even liked it - since its first performances during a heatwave in the Donmar Warehouse in 1989 I have revised it slightly, cutting much of the first scene. A sweat-drenched recording of the original version, which starred Christopher Gillett, is archived in the Barbican Library.

The Royal Opera House then commissioned me to write a piece for schools and The Button Moulder was written for what seemed to be almost all of the the pupils in a Northamptonshire comprehensive school with the title role taken by John Dobson, the famous stalwart of the Royal Opera's stage. But this takes us into the realm of my education work and the genre which I call simple opera. However, The Button Moulder and The Dream That Hath No Bottom are full-scale pieces which are not really that simple...

Neither is All in the Mind, written for a large cast of talented teenagers which meet annually to form the W11 Opera company in West London; their productions are professionally mounted to widespread acclaim. The accompaniment is for a small band of professional players.

There are one or two earlier works which were written for dance: the Invention for Violin and Piano and a vocal piece (which became Maxims, Hymn, Riddle) were choreographed by Jonathan Burrows while Ephialtes was commissioned by the touring arm of Scottish Ballet.

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