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Sunday Times

Sometimes, an artist’s indebtedness is so manifest that one would have thought it disastrous – Pinter’s, say, to Beckett, Conrad’s (in Under Western Eyes) to Dostoevsky, or Knussen’s (in Where the Wild Things Are) to Ravel – yet he only seems to flourish the more. Such is the case with Grange and Maxwell Davies. Two of these works were written for the latter’s group The Fires of London, and the idiom of each is intimately bound up with Davies’s in his chamber-music heyday. Yet Cimmerian Nocturne (inspired by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), the fascinating triplicate Variations, and Lament of the Bow have a power and drama quite their own.