Maxwell Davies reviews

Maxwell Davies has lived for many years in the Orkney Islands, and both works recorded here draw on these northern surroundings – one much more convincingly than the other. Black Pentecost sets prose extracts from George Mackay Brown’s novel Greenvoe, describing how the fictional island of Hellya becomes the site of a huge underground military installation, resulting in the destruction of the local community.

Britten set such a devastatingly high creative standard in his chamber operas that his example has proved a tough act to follow. A genre with an affordable orchestral lineup of solo instruments (it’s irreverently known in the trade as ‘opera lite’) has meant plenty of opportunities for composers since. Trouble is, it’s a necessarily thinly scored medium – and how do you generate theatrical space and atmosphere with that? In The Lighthouse, composed in 1979, Maxwell Davies confronts these issues in virtuosic style, and with dramatic success.

In these vintage examples of early-to-middle-period Maxwell Davies, his flair for popular dance-forms shines through his roguishly gaudy arrangements, made for Ken Russell’s 1971 film, of numbers from Sandy Wilson’s musical The Boyfriend (delivered here with much enjoyment by Aquarius’s line-up). Alongside this fun-of-the-fair stuff is the brooding chromaticism of Maxwell Davies’s searchingly individual take on medieval and Tudor polyphony, as in Seven In Nomine (1965) for chamber group.

There’s something unnerving about Peter Maxwell Davies’s sheer productivity. Where other composers write one or two of a particular genre, he writes an entire batch, like a Baroque Kapellmeister: ten Strathclyde Concertos, ten Naxos String Quartets. Modern composers aren’t supposed to be like that; they’re supposed to agonise over each one. Then there’s that title, Strathclyde Concerto, which doesn’t exactly make the heart go pit-a-pat.

Peter Maxwell Davies was 42 years old when he first ventured into symphonic writing. He described this first attempt at the genre, which was premiered in 1978 by the Philharmonia and a very young Simon Rattle, as marking ‘the possibility of the beginning of an orchestral competence’.

Having commissioned, recorded and released the ten Naxos Quartets, the Naxos label consolidates its relationship with Peter Maxwell Davies by facilitating the world premiere recording of his 2002 Linguae Ignis. This piece is appositely coupled with Vesalii Icones, also featuring a solo cello, and, somewhat bafflingly, his fruity reimagining of Purcell. Sadly there’s nothing remotely fruity about Mauro Ceccanti’s irredeemably po-faced Purcellian excursion, and the wind-up-gramophone gag in the Second Pavan falls distinctly flat.

 This recording of Maxwell Davies’s early opera couldn’t be better timed, with tensions between Anglicans and Catholics simmering once again. It looks back to a time when these tensions reached terrible heights, leading in the opera’s last scene to an actual burning at the stake.

This recording of Maxwell Davies’s early opera couldn’t be better timed, with tensions between Anglicans and Catholics simmering once again.

It looks back to a time when these tensions reached terrible heights, leading in the opera’s last scene to an actual burning at the stake.

This latest collection of premiere recordings contains works by no less than 66 composers from across the globe who were set the task of writing ‘technically approachable pieces in which the essence of their concert music is distilled’. The resulting miniatures are published by the Associated Board, but regardless of their pedagogical benefits, these pieces provide a wonderful and appealing album of snapshots of contemporary music, a splendid insight into its richly variegated splendour.