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.

Authentic Anthony

On the back of this new CD by Richard Casey, The Piano Music of Anthony Burgess, there's a great picture of the author/composer sitting down at a pub piano with a cigarette in his mouth. You know there's a pint of bitter at hand. This, I think, is where he was happiest: not with a novel manuscript, but messing around with his music. The best pieces on this excellent disc have an improvising-at-the-keyboard feel; those are the freshest bits, a bit off-kilter, with an odd shift or abrupt ending.

One of Burgess's guises is a slightly academic one that perhaps hides some self-consciousness and worry about his own musical bona fides. This involves a fair amount of simple fugal writing, the odd call-out to Bach or Gibbons or Ravel, some jokes for the cognoscenti (the Six Short Pieces are subtitled "The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard"), and modernist pieces in the style of Debussy, Stravinsky and Britten. But I think Burgess's heart was with a more popular style. This might be folkloric, like his clever fugue on Ye Banks and Braes. Or it could come from the grand old tradition of English Light Music. Friends is an outstanding example, sounding like something from a West End show in 1933, while Tango is more international but maybe from Act 2 of the same show. These last two pieces are, I think, as good as Burgess got as a composer. That's not to damn his musical abilities with faint praise, since it's not easy, I'm sure, to write quality music of this sort. But I believe authenticity is vitally important, and this is the music where Burgess is most himself. The whole program is beautiful played by Richard Casey, who tosses off the lighter pieces nonchalantly, and gives the more serious pieces more care, but no more than they can bear. I came away from this disc feeling much more warmly towards Burgess the composer than I did from the first disc of his Orchestral Music, back in April. Thanks to Prima Facie for this disc, and to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for their support.