SKU: HL.14021044
ISBN 9780711984813.
Roma, Amor, Labyrinthos for orchestra was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and first performed on 2nd May 2000 at the Barbican Hall, London. The Independent, May 2000: Roma, Amor, Labyrinthus captures the composers recollections of Rome as a student in the late '50s under Goffredo Petrassi, to whom the work is dedicated... [this is] one of Sir Peter's most spectacular scores, evoking the might of the ancient city from a very personal viewpoint. Duration 43 minutes. Conductor's score and orchestral parts are available on hire.
SKU: HL.14020969
ISBN 9781844491346. UPC: 884088435295. 5.5x7.5x0.136 inches.
Work for 2 Trumpets, 2 Horns and 2 Trombones premiered in the Museum of Scotland in 1998 by members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Maxwell Davies has relished incorporating brilliant tuckets and alarms for brass in his larger-scale scores too much to write a perfunctory fanfare; a seminal influence was the statue of St. Michael on the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, where he studied in the late 1950s, generator of high trumpet fanfares throughout his output which resurface in apocalyptic style towards the end of his orchestral work Roma, Amor. Parts available: SOS05301.
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.
