Peter Maxwell Davies: Sea Orpheus tours USA
(May 2010)
Peter Maxwell Davies: Sea Orpheus tours USAPeter Maxwell Davies’s new work for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, described by the New York Times as “an engagingly virtuosic score”, was commissioned as part of a series linked to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Specifically it is the 5th concerto that Maxwell Davies revisits in Sea Orpheus, with its solo flute, violin and keyboard pitted against the tutti ensemble. The new 17-minute work was featured on a tour of the USA culminating in a concert at Carnegie Hall on 6 February, with Christopher Taylor as piano soloist.
As well as being a tribute to the famed conductorless orchestra, Sea Orpheus takes its name from a poem by George Mackay Brown, in which the Greek father of song and his lost Eurydice are transported to the waveswept Orkney Islands. The mythical transformation is paralleled in musical terms through Maxwell Davies’s employment of the Tantum ergo sacramentum Gregorian chant throughout all three movements. The composer writes in his programme note that “this is the first time I have attempted to write a strictly neo-Classical work, and, as well as from the Brandenburg Concerto, I have borrowed techniques from the Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue”.
“Davies has peppered musical inspirations with textual and social reference points that serve to clarify... He views the piece as an allegory about global warming, a phenomenon that threatens his beloved Orkney Islands in coming decades. It’s an evocative, multi-textured work well worth repeated listenings.”
Musical America
Maxwell Davies’s website, relaunched last year for the composer’s 75th birthday, provides a wealth of information, including a comprehensive list of works, programme notes, over 50 audio clips, and links to purchase CDs and downloads.
Visit www.maxopus.com
> Further information on Work: Sea Orpheus
Photo: Eamonn McCabe
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