Davies' Sea-swept Orkney Islands
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Much of the music of Peter Maxwell Davies (b. this day in 1934) is evocative of his dwelling placethe distant sea-swept Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland.
Dvorák (1841), the first of this evening’s Birthday Boys, composed a couple of our offerings: we begin with his Sonatina in G, performed with elegance and élan by the brother-sister team of Gil and Orli Shaham (Gil on violin, Orli on piano); later on, the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio will delight you with everyone’s favorite, the “Dumky” Trio.
Two of Birthday-Boy Maxwell Davies’s shorter pieces turn up in our first hour. “Farewell to Stromness” (a port in the Orkneys) is played by guitarist David Russell. The BBC Singers under Simon Joly’s direction bring us “Sea Runes,” a setting of six short George Mackay Brown poems collected under that title, the last of which reads: “The fishmonger stood at the rock with bits of dull silver to trade for torrents of uncaught silver.” Maxwell Davies says that his Symphony No. 3, which is featured in our last hour, is “my most dynamic seascape to date,” and that the musical architecture relates “to the spiraling mollusk shells on my desk...and to the spiralings of the huge breakers crashing in from the Atlantic...
A Poulenc oboe sonata and Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 1 are just two of the other musical offerings to hear between bites of birthday cake.
Dvorák (1841), the first of this evening’s Birthday Boys, composed a couple of our offerings: we begin with his Sonatina in G, performed with elegance and élan by the brother-sister team of Gil and Orli Shaham (Gil on violin, Orli on piano); later on, the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio will delight you with everyone’s favorite, the “Dumky” Trio.
Two of Birthday-Boy Maxwell Davies’s shorter pieces turn up in our first hour. “Farewell to Stromness” (a port in the Orkneys) is played by guitarist David Russell. The BBC Singers under Simon Joly’s direction bring us “Sea Runes,” a setting of six short George Mackay Brown poems collected under that title, the last of which reads: “The fishmonger stood at the rock with bits of dull silver to trade for torrents of uncaught silver.” Maxwell Davies says that his Symphony No. 3, which is featured in our last hour, is “my most dynamic seascape to date,” and that the musical architecture relates “to the spiraling mollusk shells on my desk...and to the spiralings of the huge breakers crashing in from the Atlantic...
A Poulenc oboe sonata and Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 1 are just two of the other musical offerings to hear between bites of birthday cake.
