SKU: HL.14020986
ISBN 9780711960961. UPC: 884088442330. 9.0x12.0x0.071 inches.
Peter Maxwell Davies wrote this set of six short pieces in 1993 as a gift for a friend (a double bass player and composer from the BBC Philharmonic)who was celebrating the birth of his daughter. Despite the reason for writing them being most 'occasional', these pieces are certainly not lacking in musical substance as one might expect an 'occasional' piece to be. These pieces are ideal works for young performers to introduce them to playing modern music or even as an introduction to the broad range of Maxwell Davies's work.
SKU: HL.14024584
UPC: 884088815264. 11.0x8.5x0.044 inches.
Peter Maxwell Davies wrote this set of six short pieces in 1993 as a gift for a friend (a double bass player and composer from the BBC Philharmonic) who was celebrating the birth of his daughter. Despite the reason for writing them being most 'occasional', these pieces are certainly not lacking in musical substance as one might expect an 'occasional' piece to be. These pieces are ideal works for young performers to introduce them to playing modern music or even as an introduction to the broad range of Maxwell Davies's work. This is a special item which is made to order. Please e-mail our Mail Order Department for further information.
SKU: HL.14021025
ISBN 9780711986138. 5.5x7.5x0.164 inches.
Miniature Score. This work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It was first performed on 13th May 1998 London. This piece is based on a genuine old tune 'Maxwell's Strathspey' which the composer found in an 1824 collection of Scottish melodies, and which unfolds at the start of the piece on solo cello. Variations and a bold up-tempo to the quick dance we know as a reel ultimately yield to the magic that has been promised right at the start: the northern lights take over at the end of the piece. Its inspiration comes from a walk to a community event in Hoy Hall, during which Davies saw the lights in the sky pulsing in and out of time with the sounds coming from the hall. Duration 12 minutes. Conductor's score and orchestral parts are available on hire.
SKU: HL.14008428
8.25x11.75x0.06 inches.
These are all arrangements of sixteenth-century Scottish church music, beginning with Psalm 124 by David Peebles, which gains an athletic counterpoint of Davies's own. Then comes John Fethy's O God Abufe played straight, and finally an anonymous motet, All Sons of Adam, again infiltrated by a modern voice.
SKU: HL.14021021
ISBN 9780711975187. UPC: 884088440541. 9x12 inches.
A work for SATB soli, SATB chorus and orchestra, using a variety of texts, selected by Alistair Grant, who commissioned the work to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Jacobite rising (1745-6). It was first performed in October 1997 in Glasgow by Lisa Tyrrell (soprano), Margaret McDonald (mezzo soprano), Neil Mackie (tenor) and David Wilson-Johnson (baritone), the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus (chorus master Ben Parry) and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by the composer. Vocal score with piano reduction of the instrumental score. Duration c. 40mins.
SKU: HL.14021017
ISBN 9780711984677. 5.5x7.5x0.082 inches.
This work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It was first performed on 2nd May 2000 at the Barbican Centre, London, conducted by Peter Maxwell Davies. Duration c.23 minutes. Peter Maxwell Davies: The horn writing is extremely virtuoso throughout - not least in exploring the full range of the horn, from the deepest notes in the bass, normally exclusive to an orchestral fourth horn player, to the highest, most exposed sostenuto of a first horn soloist, presenting here challenges of embouchure and sheer stamina I should think fairly unprecedented. Solo part and piano reduction on sale (CH61758), Conductor's score and orchestral parts available for hire.
SKU: HL.14021000
ISBN 9780711959927. 5.5x7.5x0.2 inches.
Commissioned to write a piece for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, Davies provided a musical General Assembly of his own: a bright overture based on an Australian aboriginal song which gives rise to 'national anthems' of various kinds and instrumental colourings. Finally the 'anthems' are combined, 'if not triumphantly', Davies says, 'at least in a manner whereby they get along together'. The first performance took place in June 1995 in Nottingham. It was given by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Peter Maxwell Davies. Score (miniature). Duration c. 14mins.
SKU: HL.14008415
UPC: 884088808242. 8.5x11.0x0.261 inches.
This work, written by Maxwell Davies in 1983 for chamber orchestra, was commissioned to celebrate the quartercentenary of Edinburgh University. The first performance was given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Edward Harper in October 1983. Duration c. 29mins. This work was thought through in outline following a visit to the ruined pre-Reformation church of Hoy in Orkney, on a fine Spring afternoon after Maxwell Davies had played the harmonium for the tiny congregation in its large bleak Victorian replacement. The old church was surrounded by the graves of centuries, the more recent ones with familiar names, largely of people who lived in houses now ruinous - crofters, fishermen, clerics, sea-captains. Next to it stood the chief farmhouse, the Bu, going back to Viking times. He thought of the lives and deaths encompassed there, expressed through hundreds of years of music in the church, and in the big barn of the farm. The plainsongs 'Dies Irae' and 'Victimae Paschali Laudes' are used throughout the work - the first concerning the Day of Judgement, from the Mass for the Dead, the second particular to Easter Sunday and the Resurrection. These are subject to constant transformation - the intervallic contour slowly changes from one into the other, and their notes are made to dance through Renaissance astrological 'magic square' patterns. The orchestra consists of double woodwind, two horns, two trumpets and strings.
SKU: HL.14020963
9.0x12.0x0.5 inches.
Peter Maxwell Davies' 1979 work for mezzo-soprano, baritone and orchestra, commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra, who gave the first performance in May 1992 at the Royal Festival Hall, with Simon Rattle conducting. The 'Black Pentecost' is the coming of uranium mining, which was a threat to Orkney when the work was written. The text tells of the destruction of old ways of life, the eclipse of the human by the technological. Davies sets it as a gripping dramatic cantata which is also a four-movement symphony, with the songs for imperious baritone and lyrical mezzo-soprano linked by orchestral transitions. The work is a lament, and at the same time a fiercely argued protest. Score. Duration c. 40mins.
SKU: HL.14021002
ISBN 9780711955103. 9.0x12.0x0.054 inches.
Two dances for flute and harp from Peter Maxwell Davies' ballet Caroline Mathilde. A new instrumentation restores this linked pair of dances from Davies's second full-length ballet, Caroline Mathilde based on the story of the eighteenth-century British princess sent in marriage to Denmark, to the eighteenth-century milieu of the work's setting and musical world. The period manners - a gavotte in the first dance, a gigue at the start of the second - are typically overlaid with the composer's Scottishness. In general the harp has an accompanying role, but it comes forward alone in the second movement, which ends with bravura from both instruments. These two dances were first performed in September 1993 at the Northlands Festival by David Nicholson and Eluned Pierce. Score and flute part. Duration c. 5mins. Harp part edited by Elune Pierce.
SKU: HL.14008386
ISBN 9780711927797. UPC: 884088447434. 7.0x10.0x0.051 inches.
Peter Maxwell Davies' 1990 work for unaccompanied SATB choir, written for the BBC singers. Words by George Mackay Brown. 'Written for the BBC Singers, this piece requires a high level of choral expertise in its rhythms, intricate textures (though nearly always in four parts), wide-ranging vocal lines and characteristically dark but luminous harmony, impregnated with tritones and seconds. Not for the first time, Davies and George Mackay Brow follow the Stations of the Cross, though the fourteen sections are joined into a continuous slow-fast-slow musical movement, and the references to the events of Holy Week are oblique. Vocal score with piano accompaniment for rehearsal purposes.
SKU: HL.14008406
ISBN 9780711948716.
A work for solo violin and orchestra, commissioned by Donald McDonald for the 21st birthday of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the 60th birthday of the composer. It was first performed in November 1993 in Glasgow, by James Clark and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Maxwell Davies. The spell is one quoted by George Mackay Brown in his book An Orkney Tapestry: 'Let not plough be put to acre except a fiddle cross first the furrow.' Davies's dancing concerto imagines the fiddler following a route from field to field, from dance to dance, accompanied by a bunch of companions in the form of an orchestra. As the music goes on, so it gets brighter and livelier, moving from the dark colouring of clarinets, bassoons and strings to full ensemble with prominent brass and (solo) tuned percussion, as if the dancers as much as the fields were beginning to glow with new life. Score (miniature). Duration c. 20mins.
SKU: HL.14008374
ISBN 9781846096150. UPC: 884088435202. 8.25x11.75x0.105 inches.
The Full Score for Peter Maxwell Davies' fourth in a series of ten string quartets commissioned by the Naxos Recording company, first performed by the Maggini Quartet on 20th August 2004 at the Chapel of the Royal Palace, Oslo, Norway, as part of the Olso Chamber Music Festival. Composer Note: The fourth Naxos quartet was written in January and February of 2004, with the intention of producing something lighter and much less fierce than its predecessor, an unpremeditated and spontaneous reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq. I returned to the well-known Brueghel picture of children's games (1560, now in Vienna), which had been the inspiration for my sixth Strathclyde Concerto, for flute and orchestra. These illustrations liberated my musical imagination, but I feel it would limit the listener's perception to be too specific about which game relates to exactly which section of the work. Suffice it to say that there is vigorous play - leap-frog, bind the devil with a cord, truss, wrestling - alongside quieter pastimes - masks, guess whom I shall choose, courting, odds and evens. The single movement juxtaposes these activities as abruptly and intimately as they occur in Brueghel. Rather as the eye is taken into different perspectives and proportions of scale within the picture, taking liberties which would never be present in, for instance, Brunelleschi architectural drawings, so here, with a constant sequence of transformation processes, I have distorted the neat, precise implications of modal progression, expressed in the unison opening phrase (from F to B through A sharp/B flat), so that the ear is led, en route, into the sound equivalents of strange passageways and closed rooms: sicut exposition ludus. As work on the quartet progressed I became aware that I was reading into, and behind the games, adult motives and implications, concerning aggression and war, with their consequences. It was impossible to escape into innocent childhood fantasy. The nature of the F to B progression underlying the whole construction derives from a passage in the development of the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony, and the opening of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. However, unlike in these models, here a real - if temporary - sense of resolution occurs at the close of the quartet: as when the curtain falls on the reconciled Count and Countess in 'Figaro' one wonders how long the F/B truce will hold, and games break out again. The quartet is dedicated to Giuseppe Rebecchini, Roman architect, and friend since the nineteen-fifties.
SKU: HL.14021004
ISBN 9780711941830.
Peter Maxwell Davies. A superb cycle of 7 songs depicting the hero/heroine's stay on Grandma's farm somewhere in the Orkneys one summer. The songs tell of the farm chores, nature and ghosts and are arranged for unison voices, piano, recorders and pitched or unpitched percussion. The songs can be used individually to link in with topic work or performed as an attractive concert item. 18 mins.
SKU: HL.14021039
ISBN 9781844493425. 5.5x7.5x0.214 inches.
A dreamlike and evocative work from Peter Maxwell Davies for flute and orchestra. The piece captures the wonder and sanctuary of the composer's home, surrounded by seabirds and seals that fire the imagination in childlike ways, evoking images of mermaids and angels. Descriptive and inventive orchestral colours support and illuminate the flute solo material that is both tranquil and highly virtuosic. The piece was first performed in May 1999 at the Royal Concert Hall, Dublin.
SKU: HL.14021035
ISBN 9780711998001. Lyrics by George Mackay Brown.
A haunting setting of four elegies from the writing of George Mackay Brown, composed by Peter Maxwell Davies. Completed in 1998, this powerful and unsettling work is based upon four short verses that explore the more sinister, tragic and even supernatural qualities of the oceans and tides. Composed for soloists, mixed chorus and Orchestra, the work was commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The work was first performed in December 1998 at Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, conducted by the composer. The vocal score is available using product code CH61504.
SKU: HL.14020988
ISBN 9781846090059. UPC: 884088435233. 5.5x7.5x0.303 inches.
Spinning Jenny is a portrait of Leigh, Lancashire circa 1948 and one of a series of occasional pieces inspired by Davies' youth in Salford. Spinning Jenny Street was a noisy, hazardous street, clangerous with industry and activity when davies was at Grammar school in 1945. A modest work, but one which reflects many aspects of the place, period and people it was inspired by. Commissioned by the BBC, it was first performed on 21st July 199 as part of the BBC promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Davies himself. This is the miniature format of the full orchestral score..
SKU: HL.14008384
ISBN 9781847723970. 8.25x11.75x0.149 inches.
The complete String Quartet score for Maxwell Davies' Quartet No.6. This work was commissioned by the Naxos Recording Company, and is the sixth in a series of ten quartets. It was first performed on 26th April 2005 at the Purcell Room, London by the Maggini Quartet.
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