The two sides of Maxwell Davies' piano music

Like Alberto Ginastera, the late Peter Maxwell Davies wrote uncompromisingly complex densely avant-garde music as well as much more accessible, simple folkloric music, and like Ginastera, these disparate styles come from different periods in his life. The works written after 1980 make use of the folk-songs of the Orkney Islands, where he lived from 1971 until his death earlier this year. And like many a folkloric composer - Villa-Lobos, Bartok, Vaughan Williams, Dvorak among them - Maxwell Davies wrote his own original music in such a way that it is often mistaken as a quotation of a folk tune. This English composer (he was born in Salford, Lancashire) made such a deep connection to the land and people of the northern islands, and you can hear it in this simple, often childlike music.


The avant garde music Maxwell Davies wrote between the mid-1950s and 1981, on the other hand, reminds one of Schoenberg, Ligeti or Xenakis. This is music in an international style, but there is a core in even the most formalist works that remains intensely personal. His recomposition of Dunstable's Sub tuum protectionem shows both his cleverness and his sense of humour. The Piano Sonata of 1981 is the pinnacle of the composer's avant garde style, and one of the great Sonatas of the century. This work certainly makes an impact, condensing a huge amount of material into seven relatively short movements. With a sound world completely typical of the late 20th century, I was nevertheless reminded more than anyone of late Beethoven, in its serious search for religious meaning in abstraction.

The recording for this 2-CD Prima Facie album is actually fairly old; it was made back in August of 2010 at the University of Salford, in Maxwell Davies' home town in Lancashire. The recording is decent, and the performance outstanding. Up until now I've only known Richard Casey for his Anthony Burgess recordings, which are very good, but don't require the technique of this much more complex composer. This promises to be the standard for the piano music, probably for a long time to come.

Peter Maxwell Davies, RIP

I rushed this review a bit to honour the great composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who died today, March 14, 2016, at the age of 81. This is a fitting tribute for the Great Man of The North of England, with its cover by a fellow Lancashire lad, and another Great Man of The North, the painter LS Lowry. The short Fanfare for LS Lowry that Maxwell Davies wrote for The Lowry Arts & Entertainment Centre in Salford is a great tribute from one artist to another, and an example of so many of Maxwell Davies' best qualities: ingenuity, wit, sentiment without sentimentality, and an absolutely perfect way of writing for brass instruments.

There are more substantial works and light pieces for a wide range of instrumental combinations on this disc, that show off Max's compositional skill, but also the special talents of the The Wallace Collection. I was impressed with the cleverness of Maxwell Davies' arrangement for brass quintet of Four Voluntaries by Thomas Tallis, and by the delicacy and musicianship with which they were played. I'll be playing lots of Sir Peter's music in the future; this was a good place to start.

Peter Maxwell Davies (8 September 1934 – 14 March 2016)

And LS Lowry (1 November 1887 – 23 February 1976)

Masterpieces of British choral music

I first came across Marcus Creed’s SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart when they released an outstanding 2011 CD of choral works by Heitor Villa-Lobos. It’s part of an impressive series of recordings of music from around the world in uniform editions with simple but attractive standard design, published by Haenssler Classics from 2008 until last year’s America album. The latest recording is a joint production of Naxos Deutschland Musik and SWR Media Services, so I presume the Haenssler connection is gone, but this CD is definitely another winner. The programme is well chosen to represent relatively recent British choral composers, from Benjamin Britten, who died in 1976, to two still-living composers and another two only recently passed.

The Alleluia for 13-part a cappella choir by James Macmillan was written for the Oregon Bach Festival to commemorate the 80th birthday of conductor Helmuth Rilling, and it’s fittingly full of Bach references. This is complex music with gorgeous textures, and it shows off the versatility of the Vokalensemble and the beauty of their voices, as well as the excellence of the engineering. This was recorded in the reverberant acoustic of the Christuskirche Ganscheide in Stuttgart, as was the Schuon Hymnen of John Tavener, another piece of great beauty and a mystical vibe written to sacred texts. The rest of the album comes from the more restricted acoustic of the SWR studio. Both Jonathan Harvey’s boisterous How could the soul not take flight and Peter Maxwell Davies’ irreverent Corpus Christi with Cat and Mouse are full of complex sounds that would be lost in a cathedral acoustic. The eight short hymns and carols that make up Britten’s Sacred and Profane, op. 91, are distinguished by their beauty or ingenuity: of vocal line, rhythm or harmony. Creed’s singers have the measure of this music. This is a highly accomplished and beautifully presented programme that compares well with any UK choral recording I’ve heard in this century.