Crosse, who achieved prominence with works such as Purgatory, Changes and The Story of Vasco and Ariadne, has suffered unaccountable neglect in recent years. His music, like that of Nicholas Maw, represented the acceptable face of new music for mainstream British audiences, its heart-on-sleeve expressivity contrasting strongly with the more extreme, almost doctrinaire approach taken at that time by Goehr, Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle. This CD brought back many memories for me as a ten-year-old listening to broadcasts of Crosse orchestral music at a time when new music was still a constant feature of Radio 3’s daytime schedules.
Listening to these works now, one is still impressed by the composer’s natural ability to communicate. Written in the early 1970s, they reflect a musical climate that had not yet experienced the unabashed neo-romanticism of a Robin Holloway, David Del Tredici or Oliver Knussen. Hence, following Berg’s example, Crosse’s music is tonal in sound but has been composed using serial procedures. One’s first impression may be of considerable ease and fluency, yet in fact the urgency of this music and the telling concision with which it is put together suggests something altogether more hard won.
By far the most striking piece on this disc dates from 1971. Memories of Morning: Night is an intense drama for mezzo-soprano and orchestra which is based on Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The mezzo (the excellent Susan Bickley) narrates how a West Indian Creole heiress marries the Earl of Rochester and suffers a mental breakdown when she moves to England. This is shown by the way her song-like vocal writing is confronted and then distorted by turbulent orchestral effects, a process reminiscent of the way Crosse’s poignant Second Violin Concerto treated an Ockegham chanson two years earlier. I was particularly impressed by the pacing of the moving ‘Epilogue’, in which the deranged protagonist sets fire to Rochester’s house.
The other two works do not quite achieve the expressive power of Memories of Morning, but are valuable additions to the recording catalogue none the less. The bombastic irony of Some Marches on a Ground is well caught in this recording, even if the dramatic spatial effects of its three solo trumpets inevitably do not quite achieve the impact that they would in the concert hall. And the elegiac Cello Concerto seems to me just as elusive as when I first heard it, despite the undoubted beauty of some passages. It is in many ways the perfect work for repeated listenings, especially when rewarded with the inspired advocacy here of the cello soloist Alexander Baillie.'