The piano music of the erstwhile Master of the Queen’s Music falls
effectively into three distinct periods which slightly overlap with each
other. From his earliest years we find
Parade which is decidedly a
student work, with the clear influences of earlier composers such as Liszt,
Bartók and Prokofiev but with some anticipations of the writing to follow.
There then comes the period of Maxwell Davies’
avant-garde style,
beginning with the
Five pieces of 1955-56 and culminating in the
Piano Sonata of 1981. A year before this Maxwell Davies had
composed his most popular contribution to the piano repertoire in the shape
of his
Farewell to Stromness, which was designed specifically for
the amateur and semi-professional players he had encountered after taking up
residence in the Orkney Isles. All the remainder of his writing for the
instrument after 1978 has a similar purpose, being designed for players and
listeners to appreciate on immediate acquaintance.
The
Piano Sonata was written for Stephen Pruslin whose extensive
booklet notes with this 2 CD release make the distinction between the
various styles clear. Unfortunately on the discs the works from each period
are intermingled – which makes for some uncomfortable jolts as the listener
switches from one idiom to another. This militates against any sense of the
composer’s developing changes in method over the years. This is all the more
unfortunate since there are no other complete recordings of Maxwell Davies’s
piano music listed in the current catalogues. Indeed some of the works here,
such as the
Five little pieces,
Six secret songs,
Snow
cloud and
Parade, are to be found nowhere else. Never mind;
this sort of comprehensive review is just what is needed to celebrate the
composer’s eightieth birthday this year. One can always adjust the
programming on one’s player if one wants to experience a chronological
conspectus of the music - at least on any individual disc.
The student work
Parade, written when Maxwell Davies was just
fifteen and only recently discovered among the composer’s papers, need not
detain us for long. It has been published by Schott, but it cannot be said
that it adds much to our view of the mature composer although it bears
testimony to his prowess as a player. It is well played by Richard Casey,
but the virtuosity of the writing is its most impressive feature.
The works written between 1955 and 1981, on the other hand, are all highly
complex in Maxwell Davies’s most trenchant style. None of them however are
precisely on a large scale with the exception of the
Piano Sonata,
which can be regarded as a summary of the whole period and demonstrates the
breadth of his inspiration. Stephen Pruslin’s notes inform us that the
composer regarded both the
Five pieces and the
Five little
pieces as being influenced by Schoenberg’s
Five pieces, which
Maxwell Davies was playing “a lot” at the time. However the last of the
‘little pieces’ looks forward to the composer’s first opera
Taverner, where the main theme recurs “when the eponymous hero
identifies the figure of the Jester as ‘Death, a thief’”.
The two pieces
Sub tuam protectionem and
Ut re mi also
owe their inspiration to sixteenth century figures, John Dunstable and John
Bull respectively, and may be regarded as palimpsests on the work of those
composers. Both begin with literal quotation and develop in a manner that
almost recalls the variation techniques of the eighteen century before
moving in entirely unexpected directions.
The
Piano Sonata is described by Stephen Pruslin as “directly and
powerfully conceived for the instrument”. He devotes much space to an
analysis of its structure which includes quotations in the final movement
from two Debussy
Préludes. The sonata is headed by lines from a
poem by Charles Senior: “The cries of gulls curling in shoalward whirlwinds
around the surging firth, are muted by croak of raven and bleat of lamb from
silence to silence.” This might suggest a programmatic inspiration, but I
found this hard to detect in the music which seemed to be more concerned
with the working out of purely internal concerns. These include the use of
palindromic techniques in the fourth movement, which like most such
structural devices looks clearer on paper than in terms of sound. Although
the sonata is clearly a most serious work, I am left with the impression of
something that is consciously the end of an era rather than the beginning of
a new one.
The new era had begun three years earlier with the little three-movement
suite
Stevie’s Ferry to Hoy, with its evocative movement titles
Calm water,
Choppy seas and
Safe landing. Here we
are in firmly tonal territory and the suite was written for a local pianist
as indeed were many of the short works which followed over the next
twenty-five years. These include the famous
Farewell to Stromness
and
Yesnaby Ground from the anti-uranium mining
Yellow Cake
Review. They include some other miniature gems such as the single-page
Snow cloud, over Lochan written for a collection published by the
Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. Nonetheless some of these
pieces bear the distinctive Maxwell Davies hallmark. An example of this is
to be found in the final movement of the
Six secret songs with its
proliferation of notes invading the basically diatonic idiom to produce a
clustered discord before it suddenly clears.
The playing of Richard Casey, as far as I can tell without scores, seems
to be absolutely faultless. I must however enter a slight caveat regarding
the recording quality. While the earlier works are fine, the later pieces
seem to suffer from a slightly claustrophobic and airless acoustic. This may
have been a deliberate attempt to mimic the sound of an upright piano - on
which probably most of these pieces would have been first played. As we know
Maxwell Davies relishes the sound of a ‘honky-tonk’ piano; but somehow I
feel that these short miniatures might have benefited from a more obviously
resonant and ‘grand’ sound. The
Farewell to Stromness, for example,
is heard to better advantage elsewhere.
Nevertheless this is a valuable collection, with no competition in the
current catalogues. Its documentary value is enhanced by the interview
between pianist and composer which concludes the second disc. Stephen
Pruslin’s eleven-page essay on
Peter Maxwell Davies and the Piano
is valuable too; it bears a copyright date of 2013, which might serve to
explain the considerable delay in the release of this disc which was
recorded some four years ago.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
