CDs produced by the Club


Operas by Austin O'Neill

Austin O'Neill was Director of Music at St Chris from 1948 until his retirement in 1975. During that time he wrote a considerable amount of music for the school, the most ambitious of which were the various operas performed from 1952 onwards. From 1963 onwards he recorded most of these and had LP records made for sale to those who had taken part. Unfortunately the original reel-to-reel master tapes have been lost, but we have digitised the recordings on LP. We have digitally removed the larger scratches which had accumulated over forty years or so, but there is still some surface noise which it would be hard to remove without harm to the music.


CDs available

Alice through the Looking Glass (1963)
Double CD
£10
Duns the Name (staff, 1964)
Single CD
£5
Mylor Creek (1969)
Double CD
£10
Finger Ring (1970)
Single CD
£5
Beowulf (1971)
Double CD
£10
The Three Strangers (1973)
Single CD
£5
Inishoon (1955)
Double CD
£10

Please note that the Inishoon recording is not taken from LPs like the others, but from a tape recording made during a rehearsal. This is incomplete, and the quality is rather variable, as would be expected for a tape made in the early days of tape recording which is now over fifty years old.

Postage

Postage and packing for a single CD within the UK is £2.00. Please contact the club for postage overseas, or for several CDs together.


Can anyone help?


The last opera, M'selle Louison (1974), was taped but no LP records were produced. We know from the school diary that cassette tapes were copied and distributed to those who wanted them. The original recording has been lost, and the only cassettes we have are hopelessly corrupt. Please .. please .. does anyone have a recording of this opera we could copy and digitise?

We do not think Waltham Chase (1957) was ever recorded. Does anyone know differently?

Recordings made by SCRU


SCRU - The St Christopher Recording Unit made many recordings during the 1950s and early 1960s, and at one point the BBC came to make a news report on their activities. We have obtained three recordings made by SCRU and put them on CD. Two are reports made in Letchworth, the other a tape sent to Derek Hill shortly after he had left the school in 1962

SCRU CD £5.00, postage as for those above.


The French Cabaret


This is a recording of the French Cabaret evening in June 1961. It is of variable quality, since an old reel-to-reel tape recorder was simply left on during the evening with no adjustment for volume. A little material was lost when the tape ran out and had to be turned over. We have made adjustments while digitising to try to make it as clean as possible, but it is produced as no more than a bit of nostalgia for those who were there at the time.

French Cabaret CD £5.00, postage as for those above.

© The St Christopher Club, 2014.