Peter Maxwell Davies: The Shepherds' Calendar: SATB

Composed in 2003 The Kestrel Road was jointly commissioned by forty-seven choirs all of which are members of Music Making a national society that links several thousand amateur choirs and orchestras. This work wascommissioned as a tribute to mark the seventieth birthday of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and was performed nationwide throughout the 2004/5 season.The Kestrel Road is a song-cycle for SATB Choir and Piano settings ofpoems by the ‘Bard of Orkney’ George Mackay Brown (1917-96). The poems are highly evocative of Orkney life history and folklore with shepherds crofters fisher folk a laird a scarecrow King Barleycorn and the timeless figureof Ikey the Tinker who passes through many of Brown’s poems seemingly linking past and present. According to Maxwell Davies the music is suggestive of the ‘elusive land and seascapes’ of the islands and is much influenced bythe local folk music.

An attractive short piece for Nativity which makes an ideal concert item for unison voices and piano (with words by George Mackay Brown) commissioned by The Times for Christmas 1993.