Search - Peter Maxwell Davies, Scottish Chamber Orchestra :: Peter Maxwell Davies: Sinfonia Concertante & Sinfonia

One of three plus one more - early and mature Maxwell Davies

Discophage | France | 12/23/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This very CD appears on the present website under three different entries (the two others are Peter Maxwell Davies: Sinfonia Concertante & Sinfonia and Peter Maxwell Davies - Sinfonia Concertante & Sinfonia) - plus one more, as it is in fact the welcome reissue of a Unicorn CD, a recording made in 1986 and published in CD form in 1989. See my review of the original issue, Maxwell Davies: Sinfonia Concertante (1982) / Sinfonia (1962). Sinfonia is one of the earliest compositions of MD - the composer's first major professional orchestral commission, in fact, written for the English Chamber Orchestra. It is one in three early works in which MD derived his inspiration from Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers, of which he staged a performance at the Cirencester Grammar School (the British equivalent of high school I think) where he taught music from 1959 to 1962 (the other two being the First String Quartet and the Leopardi Fragments). Sinfonia Concertante belongs in a same category with MD's Symphonies No. 2 from 1980 and 3 from 1984 (Maxwell Davies: Symphony No. 2, Maxwell Davies: Symphony No. 3): they are turbulent works - but a turbulence never quite erupting into violent outbursts, pent-up energy that never entirely discharges -, inspired by (in the composer's own words, here applied to the third Symphony) "the presence, through the whole work, of the sea - reflecting the circumstances of its composition, at home in a tiny isolated cottage on a remote island off the north coast of Scotland, on a clifftop overlooking the meeting of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Here the sound, sight, and mood of the sea influences your whole existence, all your perceptions, and - particularly in winter - shudders right through the stones of the house, and indeed through your very bones"."