String Quartet
SKU:
HL.14008374
Composed
by Sir Peter Maxwell
Davies. Music Sales
America. Classical.
Score. Composed 2006. 24
pages. Chester Music
#CH68629. Published by
Chester Music
(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.
The Max Quartet
