SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Maxwell Davies: Gemini Ensemble, Alison Wells (soprano), Ian Mitchell (cond.), Brodsky Quartet, Mark van der Wiel (clarinet) Kings Place, London  7.45 and 9.00 pm. 21.1.2010 (GD)

Antechrist (1967)

Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (1974)

Little Quartet No.1 (1982)

Little Quartet No.2 (1987)

Hymn to Artemis Locheia (2004)

First Concert

Given that he is both the Master of the Queen’s music and one of the UK’s most popular living composers, a week-long festival promoting the music of Peter Maxwell Davies could be seen as somewhat redundant. But as soon became apparent from this evening’s two performances, there is a great deal of fine music from the composer’s earlier career, and even some from later decades, that risks being subsumed by his steady flow of new works, there being no apparent danger of either his industry or his inspiration yet deserting him. And as his recent works focus in more and more on a few, now elevated, musical priorities – folk tunes, magic squares, inscrutable large-scale forms, the music of his earlier years takes on different hues, occasionally illustrating musical concerns that have since been discarded, but more often showing that the roots of his later style go back a very long way.

So it was with the first work, Antechrist from 1967. It is of its time in many ways, with a surrealist slant which it shares with the Eight Songs for a Mad King, but also with the contemporaneous songs of Syd Barrett. Like Barrett, Max takes an English vernacular folk music tradition and uses it as the basis for psychologically disturbing aural experimentation. But it also presages the Scottish fiddle music in Max’s recent work, particularly his Naxos Quartets, and hearing this early music with the hindsight of his later, saner music is a welcome reassurance. Of the six performers two are percussionists, which gives an idea of the composer’s timbral priorities. He employs darabuka, handbells, whistles and gongs to distort the woodwind and string sonorities upon which the music is based. The players achieved an impressive feat in playing the score with the utmost precision, yet giving the impression that their performance was thrown together, with rough edits and haphazard balance, their faithfulness to the spirit of the work preventing any sense of anachronism or condescension to the 60s zeitgeist upon which the work so thoroughly relies.

Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot was completed a few years later (1974) but is, in many ways, in the same surreal tradition. It was conceived as a sequel to the Eight Songs for a Mad King, the subject this time a Miss Donnithorne, who was apparently a model for Dickens’ Miss Havisham, a would-be bride never recovering from having been stood up at the alter. Max and his librettist, Randolph Stow, sought to create a lighter work on the Mad King model, and humour was an important part of their plan. It is certainly a funny, although only occasionally ha-ha funny. The occasion, for example, were they get their eponymous heroine drunk on her own dandelion, hiccupping and falling over the furniture - that raised some laughs. But the work suffers through comparison with the Eight Songs; it has more words and less notes, leading to numerous recitative longueurs. Of course, that is to compare a perfectly serviceable piece of music theatre with the undisputed masterpiece of the genre, which is perhaps a little unfair. But what a great performance from Alison Wells, resplendent in her moth-eaten Miss Havisham wedding dress. The clarity of her diction allowed all the jokes to be clearly heard, and she has the comic timing to tell them. She was perhaps a little inanimate, but the consummate theatricality of her performance was never in doubt. Fine playing from the ensemble too, and special mention should go Joby Burgess for his virtuoso marimba playing. The composer makes some heavy demands in this piece – having the ensemble play over the sound of four unsynchronised metronomes, for example – but each was handled with impressive panache.

Second Concert

The second performance of the evening was given by the Brodsky Quartet, and though I’ve said this many times before, it continues to be an unsurpassed joy to hear chamber music performances of this level of precision played in the unparalleled (at least in London) acoustic of the Kings Place hall. Their first two pieces were Max’s Little Quartets, two short works dating from the 1980s. Stylistically, they are a long way from the later Naxos Quartets, simpler and in many ways more traditional. I found them refreshingly unpretentious, explorations in timbre and texture, for the most part slow and based on long arching phrases. The programme note suggests the works were written for amateur performance, but it is hard to imagine any players apart from the best achieving such pure, rarefied textures.

For the final work, Hymn to Artemis Locheia, the quartet was joined by the clarinettist Mark van de Wiel. Like Robert Simpson’s 6th Symphony, the instigation for the Hymn came from Professor Ian Craft, a fertility expert with a strong interest in the musical corollaries of his discipline. On commissioning the work, Craft invited Max to visit his London clinic for a day, and the music was the direct result of his experiences. It is more abstract than this history suggests, but the notion of joy (ostensibly at having achieved conception) permeates its every bar. The work is long and structurally idiosyncratic; a characteristic of music by a composer for whom inspiration comes so easily. In truth, it is at least ten minutes longer than it needs to be (the duration being stipulated in the commission perhaps?) but is otherwise a good example of all that is best about Maxwell Davies’ recent music: mastery of instrumental colour, suppleness of form, technical proficiency (of course), and the confidence to follow contrived and idiosyncratic musical paths, safe in the knowledge that he has the ear of a significant audience who trust his musical instincts as well as he does himself.

Gavin Dixon