Gramophone

A modern recording of Ave maris stella (1975) has long been needed. It is one of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s most challenging compositions for the Fires of London, closely linked in both atmosphere and structure with the long sequence of Orkney-inspired symphonic compositions on which he had recently embarked. But the music also explores tensions between intricately structured and expansively improvisatory materials which could hardly work in conducted orchestral music. As such, it has a certain experimental quality, and I’m not entirely persuaded that the long marimba cadenza – played here with some deliberation by Joby Burgess – is quite imaginative enough to balance the marvellously wrought dialogues between rapturous lyricism and stormy agitation which are otherwise predominant. The impact of Gemini’s performance, in this properly concentrated acoustic environment, is nevertheless more than enough to explain the high place accorded to the work in the Maxwell Davies canon.

Psalm 124, written the year before Ave maris stella, is a more explicit tribute to things Scottish, characteristically transforming found 16^th-century materials in ways that shun parodistic extravagance and owe much to the understated reflectiveness of its interludes for solo guitar. There are also two much more recent pieces. Dove,Star-Folded (2000) is a generally sober tribute to Sir Stephen Runciman whose scoring for string trio offers a foretaste of the textural qualities developed in the Naxos Quartet cycle. Economies of Scale (2002) is more exuberant, and although its title reflects its dedication to the Scottish economist James Merrilees, the composer keeps explicit restraints, as well as tonal implications, in check until the gentle final stages.

—Arnold Whittall