Sir Peter Maxwell Davies RIP

[ardcarp]

I watched Master and Maverick last evening, and thought it a very well-wrought programme with something both for the cognoscenti and the general music lover. Those lucky kids at Cirencester Grammar School having PMD as their music master. Can one imagine a scene like that today, pupils standing in rapt awe around the piano as the master plays? (Thank goodness too that Farewell to Stromness did not permeate the whole programme!)

[visualnickmos]

Anyone who missed it might like to know that it is being shown again on Sunday, April 3 at 7pm.

Thanks for the notice. I'm looking forward it.....

[kea]

I listened to the 1st Symphony based on several of you's high opinions of PMD's symphonic output (plan to go through 2-6 as well and maybe 10). I think the length had put me off his symphonies for a while, but having listened to all the Bruckner symphonies and most of Mahler's without falling asleep (too often, anyway) I figured I was well prepared.

No. 1 is a pretty impressive work—doesn't sound twelve-note to me (maybe eight-note?) but in some ways felt like a mature symphony from Schoenberg, I guess due to a persistent lyricism in the instrumental writing that frequently served to make the moods less stern. Some things I appreciated include (a) that at many points the texture includes instrumental lines that can only be heard with one's "peripheral hearing", if that makes sense—essentially there's a sense of many superimposed layers of activity, some of which are backgrounded and almost inaudible, which are filtered in and out to create new sections. That's something I'm quite interested in myself at this point in time. (b) That although the tempi are rarely fast (even though the outer movements are marked Presto) the "fast music" always has a sense of drive and forward motion, created I think through staggering the activity of the different lines so as to offset their individual stumbling, hesitant rhythms. (c) The use of the marimba in an orchestral context. I didn't like the other tuned percussion so much; for me glockenspiel and crotales get quite wearying if overused. (d) The piece ends loudly, and not in a doom-and-gloom apocalyptic fashion. (For some reason, it seems just about every contemporary piece fades away softly into the aether these days, and loud endings are seen exclusively as the province of the likes of James MacMillan and Lowell Liebermann, unless you manage to remove any positive quality from them. )

The things I wasn't so fond of were (a) the orchestration sounded thick and muddy. But perhaps that's the recording—I listened to Rattle/Philharmonia, who seem to have gone into the studio not too long after premiering the work, so there may simply not have been time to get the balance right. I have not heard the composer's recording, which is probably more authoritative. (b) The presentation of his interesting and arguably post-symphonic materials within a symphonic context. Not necessarily in the sense that there's a sonata form or a tonal centre or whatever, but that everything is made to "fit" into a context that requires things like climaxes and cooldowns and tension/release, where it actually fits quite uncomfortably. At the same time, this piece uses the symphonic title in a relatively abstract way, whereas I've heard for later ones he talks about tonality and form a lot more. And one could argue that a lot of the interest comes from the tension between material and form (though the place I found this most intrusive, the slow movement, was also where I found my mind wandering most often)

[Richard Barrett]

I listened to the 1st Symphony based on several of you's high opinions of PMD's symphonic output (plan to go through 2-6 as well and maybe 10)

I would agree with a great deal of what you say here, kea. His overuse of crotales in the orchestra, here and elsewhere, seemed to have infected many other British composers at that time. As for the "muddy orchestration", I remember being very impressed back then with his saying that he didn't actually orchestrate as such at all; the orchestration was just the result of a distribution and superimposition of his materials, which are strictly constructed in a way strongly influenced by Schoenberg's techniques but, as you say, not based on recycling the twelve chromatic pitch-classes, rather IIRC using systematic moves around a "magic square" which produce something analogous to tonal centres but with different intervallic relationships. (Like Schoenberg, he seems to have felt the presence of a "tonality-shaped hole" which needed to be filled with something.) I remember him also saying that the 1st Symphony had structural ties to Sibelius, maybe others will know more about this, but at the time when the piece came out my knowledge of Sibelius was basically zero so I didn't take much notice of that.

A couple of years ago I listened through a few of the symphonies and I remember no.2 having the most impact, but I think I would also be right in saying that no.1 is by far the most complex of the set.