Banquo's Buried (1982)

The Australian composer Alison Bauld has always had a keen interest in the theatre: she trained and worked as an actor before taking up music, which she studied first at Sydney University and then with Elizabeth Lutyens and Hans Keller in this country. Among her works with a theatrical element are a ballad opera Nell and a series of    what she describes as “dramatic scenas” based on texts from Shakespeare’s plays, the two most often performed of which are Banquo’s Buried and Where should Othello Go. Comissioned for the University of New South Wales Music Department, Banquo’s Buried was first performed there in 1982. The first London performance was given by Frances Lynch and Lucy Wilson at Leighton House three years later. The treatment of the text from Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene “owes a little” she says, “to the composer’s memory of a powerful and idiosyncratic performance of the role by Dame Sybil Thorndike. The manner was operatic and perhaps, even then, unfashionable, but there was a ‘go-for-broke’ spirit which made sense of the tragedy. The piece was conceived for all sopranos who enjoy a sense of theatre.”