Sea Orpheus
inspired by Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5
For piano, flute, violin and string orchestra. Approximately 18 minutes.
Carnegie Hall Premiere: February 6, 2010
This piece will be given its New York Premiere on Saturday, February 6, 2010 at Carnegie Hall on a program featuring pianist Angela Hewitt.
For complete program information or to purchase tickets, click here.
World Premiere Tour Performances:
In 1971, Peter Maxwell Davies left England for the remote and picturesque island of Hoy, in the Orkney region just north of mainland Scotland. Nearly four decades later, still living in Orkney, the unassuming composer who goes by Max is one of Britain’s great cultural ambassadors and an international musical icon. His new work, Sea Orpheus, is the final contribution to the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s New Brandenburg Project, a series of commissions that tapped leading composers to create works in response to Bach’s six “Brandenburg” concertos. This piece reflects the “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 5 plus other influences, as Maxwell Davies explains in the following note:
Sea Orpheus takes its inspiration from a poem by George Mackay Brown, the Orcadian poet.
There are three movements, played without a break, all based on a Gregorian chant, ‘Tantum Ergo Sacramentum’, which is subject to constant transformation processes, and is present throughout in some form. The work was commissioned as a companion piece to Bach’s Fifth “Brandenburg” Concerto, and has a similar orchestration, with flute and violin solos, and a virtuoso keyboard part, taking full advantage of the modern grand piano. 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 Bach’s Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue.
The first movement has alternating fast and slow sections—the fast sections featuring first the solo flute, then the violin, then the piano, with the slow sections expanding the solo cello line at the beginning into ever more elaborate mensuration canons [meaning that the voices progress at different speeds]. There is a cadenza for piano, in three sections interspersed in the first movement, the first section for left hand alone, the second for right hand alone, and the third putting the first two sections together.
The second, slow movement features the soloists only, leading to a quick finale, whose progress is interrupted twice by short slow sections, the first for solo piano, and the second for the string orchestra, with figured bass piano. The music ends quietly, with a final reference to The Art of Fugue.
–Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost composers of our time. His charismatic and versatile musical personality, coupled with the world-wide spread of performances has meant that he reaches an unusually large and varied public.
As the critic in the Wiener Zeitung wrote following a concert of all Maxwell Davies works at the Musikverein in Vienna “A great and significant occasion on the Vienna concert scene and the public took full advantage of it: the Musikverein was almost fully booked and scarcely anyone left in the interval. I know of no other living composer who could bring that off with a programme consisting entirely of his own works.”
His theatrical works include his operas Taverner, Resurrection and The Doctor of Myddfai, chamber operas The Lighthouse (which has received over 100 different productions world-wide since its premiere in 1980) and The Martyrdom of St. Magnus, his full-length ballets Salome and Caroline Mathilde, and five music-theatre works including Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot which have both become contemporary classics. His orchestral works include eight symphonies, which The Times has called “the most important symphonic cycle since Shostakovich”, the last of which being the Antarctic Symphony, for which he visited the Antarctic in 1997. He has written concertos for violin, trumpet, piano, horn and piccolo, and the ten 'Strathclyde Concertos' (written for the principal players of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra), as well as some lighter orchestral works, such as An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (“the most performed piece of contemporary music”) Mavis in Las Vegas and Swinton Jig. Major works for chorus, soloists and orchestra include The Three Kings, Job and The Jacobite Rising.
Maxwell Davies is also active as a conductor and has recently finished ten years as Composer/Conductor of both the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, and is Composer Laureate with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He has also conducted many orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Russian National Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Maxwell Davies has been recently concentrating his compositional efforts on chamber music, including the cycle of ten string quartets which were commissioned by the CD company Naxos and are called the Naxos Quartets. These were performed in their entirety at the Wigmore Hall in London by the Maggini Quartet over a period of five years between 2002 and 2007, and have all been recorded for release on Naxos.
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was appointed Master of the Queen's Music in March 2004