The resurgence of interest in the music of Havergal Brian around the time of the performance of his gargantuan Gothic Symphony at the Proms in 2011 has died away again, leaving only hardcore enthusiasts championing his cause. The Havergal Brian Society has long been the focus of those efforts, and in 1997, 25 years after the composer’s death, it organised the concert performance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, of his opera The Cenci that has now been issued on disc.
Brian began The Cenci in 1951, the year in which, apparently by coincidence, Berthold Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci, based on the same play by Shelley, was one of four prizewinning works in a Festival of Britain competition for new opera.
