Max: A Musical Portrait of Peter Maxwell Davies – review
An affectionate look at the Orkneys’ reclusive composer proves both touching and revealing
A few weeks ago composer Peter Maxwell Davies made the news by suggesting that audience members who forget to switch off their mobile phones should be fined if the performance is interrupted. There was a very obvious irony here: anyone listening to one of Maxwell Davies’s early works could be forgiven for wondering whether a ring tone had been written into the score.
Back in the 1960s, Max, as he is commonly known, was one of the enfants terribles of British music – a pioneer of the avant garde – but now he is nearing 80, he is very much part of the classical mainstream. The St Magnus Festival that he founded in Orkney in 1977 is still running, and in 2004 he was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music. Max – a Musical Portrait of Peter Maxwell Davies (BBC4) was an affectionate film made by his friend, Paul Joyce. Perhaps too affectionate. Max is clearly a lovely man, but the challenging nature of his music demanded a more challenging response.
I would have liked him to speak about why, as he has grown older, his music appears to have become much more accessible and tonal; some of his contemporaries no longer regard him as a modernist. Is it a function of age, happiness or musical development? Or is it even a fair judgment? Similarly, while the silence and emptiness of the Orkneys were beautifully filmed and described, we saw tiny of the darkness and the storms that are as much part of the landscape as they are of his music.
That said, there were some genuine and touching revelations. His debt to the schoolchildren to whom he once taught music; their lack of fear and inhibition were his inspiration. The story behind Farewell to Stromness, his intensely sad and lyrical solo piano piece. I would never have guessed it was written in anger at proposals to mine uranium on the island. But ideal of all was the film’s mere existence. The pleasure and indulgence of an intelligent TV hour, devoted to a contemporary composer, comes round all too rarely.
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Submited at Saturday, July 16th, 2011 at 8:00 am on Entertainment by samantha
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