Search - Peter Maxwell Davies :: Peter Maxwell Davies: Naxos Quartets Nos. 9 & 10

A fitting finale to a nice series

Personne | Rocky Mountain West | 12/05/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The string quartet has long been considered as one of the defining formats for composers. How then is it that there are so few in the last hundred years? There are only a handful of composers who have more than a single quartet. Even in those cases, the quartets may be spread over the lifetime of the composer. Each of the Elliott Carter quartets marks out new territory for the composer, serving almost as a synopsis for everything he was doing in that period. The same is true for Bela Bartok, whose first quartet started out in Romantic territory and whose last is a piece of sublime integration. You have to go back much farther, to Schubert or Beethoven, before you find quartets written in rapid succession. Naxos has done what in recent times in unthinkable. They commissioned a series of ten quartets from a single composer to be performed by a single ensemble. Peter Maxwell Davies was the lucky recipient of this commission.



Several decades back, Davies scared the daylights out of concertgoers with aggressively theatrical pieces like "Eight Songs of a Mad King". Many have never forgiven him, and are unfamiliar with his work in the years since. Like many composers who started out in similar fashion (Penderecki, Rochberg), he backed away to more conservative territory. In Davies' case, we're back in a world that sounds a lot like Bartok. It's certainly not slavish copycatting (although moments in the "Alla Marcia" of the 9th quartet sound a LOT lot the Bartok 6th) but rather an exploration of the possibilities of that world. There are no studies of conflicting time, as in the Carter 2nd or Ives 2nd: if the notation says "allegro", then everybody's on board for allegro.



The series as a whole is good (I did in fact buy each CD as it came out), but is not defining. When I first heard the Bartok 4th, I had to deal with it. Like a few other pieces, it opened doors to new places. That is not the case with this series. The music is well-written and quite well-played, but it won't make you angry. It's good stuff, to be certain, but not great stuff. I must say that I love the way the last quartet ends. Rather than serve as a massive overwrought summation of the series, it simply stops in the middle of a simple hornpipe. Inspired. I will certainly enjoy returning to these pieces from time to time.



There have been a great many record labels over my lifetime that were considered simply budget labels and only later appreciated for what they had done. I'm thinking of Decca, Vox, Nonesuch and a few others. Naxos is that label now. I hope they continue commissions like this, bringing new music into the world."