Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a composer. He makes his living entirely from writing music even though he

doesn't particularly care what people think of it. He was brought up in Lancashire

and went to the Royal Manchester School of Music where he was a founder member with Alexander Gere and

Peter Maxwell Davis of the Manchester New Music Group.

Their ambition was to liberate English music from the pastoral tradition, and in his first opera, Puncheon Judy, he began to do just that.

At its premiere in Albra, Benjamin Britain walked out.

For eight years he oversaw the music for the National Theatre which included writing the score

for Amadeus which many people attributed to Mozart.

His operas, The Mask of Orpheus and Garwain's Journey, have been performed at the ENO to critical acclaim and he's currently working on

another called the second Mrs. Kong for Glineborn. He is Sir Harrison Bertwistle.

Is this Harry Mrs. Kong as in King Kong? Yes the same person and I

suppose it's suggesting that the first Mrs. Kong was Faye Ray. Maybe I don't

know. And what happened?

I mean, what's the plot?

It's really about the idea of Kong himself and about how Kong never really existed as a person but the idea of him because in the film he only

existed as a an eight-inch puppet and yet we all have this sort of feeling about the personality of him.

So it's about his identity.

Now this is for Glineborn as I said for the new revamped Gl Kleinborn next summer.

Obviously it's not...

I wonder if they like to say revamped.

...