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BBC SO/Rumon Gamba conductor;
Roderick Williams baritone This evening celebrated extravagantly the 70th birthday later this year of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, featuring a world premiere for the BBC Singers, and three of his iconoclastic assaultsunleashed upon us with force in the late '60s. I wonder how many stayed the course, whether at the St Giles + Barbican Centre, or listening at home on R3? At St Giles, the choral concert, a full nourishing meal on its own, was a joy heard in the church's ideal acoustic, and with Max's helpful introductions about a lifetime of composing for choirs. He emphasised his wide literary and linguistic interests and enduring pleasure in selecting and setting texts which fire his imagination, rather as did famously Benjamin Britten. In the church we were supplied with all the words, in a mixture of Medieval English and French, Italian with translation, and Mackay Brown's poems for Westerlings in modern English and Orkney Norn; all of it fascinating to decipher and follow as we listened. The music is far too intricate to pick out more than an occasional word by ear alone, so listeners at home were sadly restricted to a generalised introduction to what they were about, and how constructed, obliged to listen as to abstract music. Angelus is a subtle compilation of texts by Michelangelo conceived as pondering in old age philosophical writings of Marsilio Ficino. Corpus Christi with Cat and Mouse is a wholly delightful setting of fragments of a sixteenth century manuscript, an evocative rag bag of a compendium of anything and everything, including puzzles, poems and recipes for cures and horticulture, unified by verses from the Corpus Christi carol; all no doubt comprehensible to the Baliol College choristers for whom it was composed. Westerlings, about all the moods of the sea and voyages of 9th century Norse settlers to Orkney, is better known, a virtuoso choral work for Uppsala and firmly established in the repertory of the BBC Singers; extremely beautiful and evocative, but I felt (not for the first time) that its predominantly slow pacing could have been more varied to advantage. The opportunity to revisit Max's then outrageous music of his mid-thirties, a portrait of the composer in 1969, was irresistible to those of us who heard the pieces when new. Sadly, the 'foxtrot for orchestra' St Thomas Wake, with a band in boaters, funny hats and red waistcoats, which counterpoints sheer cacophony perpetrated in the orchestra, failed to entrance 35 years on. Apparently the noise and fury was a (very belated) effort to exorcise the horrors of the '39-'45 War, during which Davies used to listen to parental 78s of Charleston foxtrots..... It is all derived, so we're told, from a pavan of which we were vouchsafed on the harp so very few notes of it that even those of us who know John Bull's music would have been hard put to identify it; and how many listeners, now or back in the '60s, could ever follow the recondite intellectualism of Max's music of that period? I had hoped that the Mad King (about George III's porphyria) would renew good early memories of this music theatre piece, with Roy Hart's astonishing 'extended' vocalisations and Jennifer Ward-Clarke of the Fires of London playing her cello in a cage - and that it might also exorcise the execrable, excremental production of it by David Freeman's Opera Factory. But in the unsuitable auditorium of The Barbican it made a wan impression, with Roderick Williams unable to recreate the frisson of the '60s, nor capable of getting across the text. The "production" was minimal and chiefly served to throw us into darkness, leaving us unable to hear more than about 2% of the words and prevented from following the text provided in full in the BBC's excellent (and not over-priced) £1 programme. To sample what we missed at The Barbican, hear an extract from the recording of Eight Songs for a Mad King on Sir Maxwell Davies' new website, which offers inexpensive purchase possibilities of the long deleted recordings of his music. After more than three hours, I denied myself 42 minutes of the Worldes Blis and opted instead for Blis at home, taking the choral texts back so that my wife & I could enjoy full appreciation of Angelus and Corpus Christi with Cat and Mouse in the delayed R3 transmission at 10.15 - very good sound reproduction from St Giles. What a pity that thought had not been taken to make all the texts available to home listeners, either on the BBC's website, or on Max's own new website; most of them are long out of copyright, and surely George Mackay Brown's executors would have gladly allowed his Westerlings poems to be posted?
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