Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin

 Peter Maxwell Davies

 

Peter Maxwell Davies, born at Manchester in 1934, has composed over 200 works which have been performed the world over. Early on he concerned himself with the relations between England’s old music (esp. John Taverner) and the European avantgarde (Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono). His first opera „First Fantasia on an In Nomine of John Taverner“ was the result of this connection. The legend surrounding Taverner who, during the English reformation, is said to have abandoned composition in order to become a protestant zealot, throws another light on Davies: his interest for excentrics, loners and other extreme individuals.

The one act works performed here, „Eight Songs for a Mad King“ and „Miss Donnithorne‘s Maggot“, are only small splinters from what the English critic Paul Griffiths called a musical universe of „craziness, perversion and delirium“.Griffiths even likens Davies to his characters when he points out that „he has spent almost his whole adult life in quite isolated places: in the countryside of western England and in a small farmstead on the cliffs of Hoy (Orkney islands)“.
One would, however, not do justice to Davies if one saw in him only the eccentric assembler of sounds. Together with Harrison Birtwistle he founded his own ensemble „Pierrot Players“ in 1967, which consisted of the six musicians required for the performance of Arnold Schönberg’s „Pierrot lunaire“, and for which he wrote dozens of scores. With the performance of his first opera „The Martyrdom of Saint Magnus“, a local saint of the Orkneys, he initiated a yearly high summer music event for the barren island which has become his home. Last but not least, as composer and conductor he has been intimately connected with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra London and the BBC Philharmonic Manchester. As guest conductor he has appeared, among others, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Oslo Philharmonic.

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