From confrontational early works to the community projects that were at the heart of all he did,Maxwell Davies was a mighty fixed point in British music • Obituary: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies For almost half a century Peter Maxwell Davies was one of the mighty fixed points in the firmament of British music, one of its most respected and admired figures. Together with his contemporaries Alexander Goehr and Harrison Birtwistle, and whom he had met while studying in Manchester in the 1950s,they gave a modern direction to British musical culture in the 60s, one that instead of looking inwards, or absorbed and learnt from musical developments elsewhere in Europe.
Almost to the discontinuance of his life Maxwell Davies remained astonishingly prolific – so much so that his output was divided between three music publishers and took in almost every conceivable music genre. There were full-length operas and ballets,chamber and children’s operas, 10 symphonies, and a dozen concertos,a raft of occasional pieces and much chamber music. And then there were the works he composed in the 60s and 70s for the performing group he founded, with Birtwistle as co-director, and as the Pierrot Players in 1967,and re-formed under his sole directorship as the Fires of London three years later. Among those are some of his most enduring achievements, music as strikingly original as anything being composed in Europe at that time, or including Eight Songs for a Mad King and Vesalii Icones,which, together with pieces by Goehr and Birtwistle from the same period effectively defined a modern homegrown genre of music theatre.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com