SKU: HL.14010200

UPC: 884088837112.

“Elutropia is a Gemme, in colour greene, or grassie, in part coloured and bespotted with Purple speckes & bloud coloures vaines. This is a marvellous Jugler, for it will cause things object to be presented to our eies as it listeth. It being put into a Basan of water chaungeth to a mans eyesight the Sunne his beames, and giveth them a contrarie colour. Being also moved and beaten in the ayre maketh to appeare a bloudie Sunne, and darkneth the ayre in the maner of an Eclipse: and therfore it is called Eloutropia as you would say, the Sunne his enimie. There is of this name also a certain Hearbe which Enchaunters & Witches have oftentimes used and doe use, as also that above said, whereby they have mocked and deluded many, which by meanes and working and enchauntment, have so dazzled the beholders eies, that they have gone by them invisibly.” John Maplet (died 1592) A greene forest, or A natural historie 1567 This text from the clergyman, astrologer and natural historian John Maplet's fascinating work in which he describes the properties of various gemstones is the inspiration for this piece. Without being programmatic, the music is constantly developed to try and mimic the way the shafts of light mutate through the gem, and the illusions and magic they create.

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.