I was looking forward to going to Malcolm Williamson’s opera English Eccentrics set to a text by Edith Sitwell at the Peacock Theatre this week partly because my only experience of meeting the composer was so bizarre, not to say traumatic, that I haven’t been able to face listening to any of his copious output since. Not that there have been many opportunities, since he seems to be neglected in concert, on the radio and to a large degree on CD.
The week before the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 Rodney Long, the great doctor who successfully treated me for advanced alcoholism in 1971, phoned me up — he believed in keeping in touch with his former patients and encouraging them to help his present ones — and told me that the Master of the Queen’s Music was having difficulty completing a symphony for Her Majesty’s jubilee and even, I think, composing a fanfare.
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