SKU: HL.14024584

UPC: 884088815264. 11.0x8.5x0.044 inches.

Peter Maxwell Davies wrote this set of six short pieces in 1993 as a gift for a friend (a double bass player and composer from the BBC Philharmonic) who was celebrating the birth of his daughter. Despite the reason for writing them being most 'occasional', these pieces are certainly not lacking in musical substance as one might expect an 'occasional' piece to be. These pieces are ideal works for young performers to introduce them to playing modern music or even as an introduction to the broad range of Maxwell Davies's work. This is a special item which is made to order. Please e-mail our Mail Order Department for further information.

SKU: HL.14008420

9.0x12.0x0.489 inches.

There are seven songs and an instrumental interlude, making all together an entertainment that provides opportunity for very simple stage action and dancing: nothing at all elaborate is needed in the way of scenery and costumes. The voices are in unison throughout, and their part is always doubled by instruments, which should make it relatively easy for quite young children to learn their way into Davies's delightful tunes. The references to Hoy are incidental, and could possibly be adapted to suit the locality of a particular performance. In any event, most of these tall stories and rhymes will appeal to children everywhere. Set of instrumental parts (8 descant recorder parts, 4 tuned percussion parts and 4 unpitched percussion parts).

SKU: HL.14021021

ISBN 9780711975187. UPC: 884088440541. 9x12 inches.

A work for SATB soli, SATB chorus and orchestra, using a variety of texts, selected by Alistair Grant, who commissioned the work to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Jacobite rising (1745-6). It was first performed in October 1997 in Glasgow by Lisa Tyrrell (soprano), Margaret McDonald (mezzo soprano), Neil Mackie (tenor) and David Wilson-Johnson (baritone), the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus (chorus master Ben Parry) and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by the composer. Vocal score with piano reduction of the instrumental score. Duration c. 40mins.

SKU: HL.14021000

ISBN 9780711959927. 5.5x7.5x0.2 inches.

Commissioned to write a piece for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, Davies provided a musical General Assembly of his own: a bright overture based on an Australian aboriginal song which gives rise to 'national anthems' of various kinds and instrumental colourings. Finally the 'anthems' are combined, 'if not triumphantly', Davies says, 'at least in a manner whereby they get along together'. The first performance took place in June 1995 in Nottingham. It was given by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Peter Maxwell Davies. Score (miniature). Duration c. 14mins.

SKU: HL.14020963

9.0x12.0x0.5 inches.

Peter Maxwell Davies' 1979 work for mezzo-soprano, baritone and orchestra, commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra, who gave the first performance in May 1992 at the Royal Festival Hall, with Simon Rattle conducting. The 'Black Pentecost' is the coming of uranium mining, which was a threat to Orkney when the work was written. The text tells of the destruction of old ways of life, the eclipse of the human by the technological. Davies sets it as a gripping dramatic cantata which is also a four-movement symphony, with the songs for imperious baritone and lyrical mezzo-soprano linked by orchestral transitions. The work is a lament, and at the same time a fiercely argued protest. Score. Duration c. 40mins.

SKU: HL.14021002

ISBN 9780711955103. 9.0x12.0x0.054 inches.

Two dances for flute and harp from Peter Maxwell Davies' ballet Caroline Mathilde. A new instrumentation restores this linked pair of dances from Davies's second full-length ballet, Caroline Mathilde based on the story of the eighteenth-century British princess sent in marriage to Denmark, to the eighteenth-century milieu of the work's setting and musical world. The period manners - a gavotte in the first dance, a gigue at the start of the second - are typically overlaid with the composer's Scottishness. In general the harp has an accompanying role, but it comes forward alone in the second movement, which ends with bravura from both instruments. These two dances were first performed in September 1993 at the Northlands Festival by David Nicholson and Eluned Pierce. Score and flute part. Duration c. 5mins. Harp part edited by Elune Pierce.

SKU: HL.14021022

ISBN 9780711982888.

This work was commissioned by the University of British Columbia through the gift of David Lemon. It was first performed on 11th May 1997 at the Chan Center, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, by Valdine Anderson (soprano), Linda Maguire (mezzo soprano), Paul Moore (tenor) and Kevin McMillan (baritone), with the Vancouver Bach Choir and the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, conducted by the composer. Like Vaughan Williams in his Job: A Masque for Dancing, Davies was inspired in part by William Blake's 21 engravings for the Book of Job. His oratorio, however, is less dependent on finding parallels for Blake's visual details, given the direct poetry in David Lemon's adaptation of the Stephen Mitchell translation from the biblical original, it is hardly surprising that the spotlight should be so much on Job's suffering litany. The baritone has the lion's share of the setting, though the other soloists occasionally reinforce his plea and chorale-like episodes universalize his predicament. Davies frames with work with two seminal plainsong-like passages; there is also plenty of dramatic contrast both within Job's monologues and in the vivid orchestral writing for the smarmy Comforters, the initially shrill God who finally appears out of a dazzling orchestral whirlwind and the animal life he uses to illustrate the wonders of creation to a humbled Job.

SKU: HL.14008415

UPC: 884088808242. 8.5x11.0x0.261 inches.

This work, written by Maxwell Davies in 1983 for chamber orchestra, was commissioned to celebrate the quartercentenary of Edinburgh University. The first performance was given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Edward Harper in October 1983. Duration c. 29mins. This work was thought through in outline following a visit to the ruined pre-Reformation church of Hoy in Orkney, on a fine Spring afternoon after Maxwell Davies had played the harmonium for the tiny congregation in its large bleak Victorian replacement. The old church was surrounded by the graves of centuries, the more recent ones with familiar names, largely of people who lived in houses now ruinous - crofters, fishermen, clerics, sea-captains. Next to it stood the chief farmhouse, the Bu, going back to Viking times. He thought of the lives and deaths encompassed there, expressed through hundreds of years of music in the church, and in the big barn of the farm. The plainsongs 'Dies Irae' and 'Victimae Paschali Laudes' are used throughout the work - the first concerning the Day of Judgement, from the Mass for the Dead, the second particular to Easter Sunday and the Resurrection. These are subject to constant transformation - the intervallic contour slowly changes from one into the other, and their notes are made to dance through Renaissance astrological 'magic square' patterns. The orchestra consists of double woodwind, two horns, two trumpets and strings.

SKU: HL.14008374

ISBN 9781846096150. UPC: 884088435202. 8.25x11.75x0.105 inches.

The Full Score for Peter Maxwell Davies' fourth in a series of ten string quartets commissioned by the Naxos Recording company, first performed by the Maggini Quartet on 20th August 2004 at the Chapel of the Royal Palace, Oslo, Norway, as part of the Olso Chamber Music Festival. Composer Note: The fourth Naxos quartet was written in January and February of 2004, with the intention of producing something lighter and much less fierce than its predecessor, an unpremeditated and spontaneous reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq. I returned to the well-known Brueghel picture of children's games (1560, now in Vienna), which had been the inspiration for my sixth Strathclyde Concerto, for flute and orchestra. These illustrations liberated my musical imagination, but I feel it would limit the listener's perception to be too specific about which game relates to exactly which section of the work. Suffice it to say that there is vigorous play - leap-frog, bind the devil with a cord, truss, wrestling - alongside quieter pastimes - masks, guess whom I shall choose, courting, odds and evens. The single movement juxtaposes these activities as abruptly and intimately as they occur in Brueghel. Rather as the eye is taken into different perspectives and proportions of scale within the picture, taking liberties which would never be present in, for instance, Brunelleschi architectural drawings, so here, with a constant sequence of transformation processes, I have distorted the neat, precise implications of modal progression, expressed in the unison opening phrase (from F to B through A sharp/B flat), so that the ear is led, en route, into the sound equivalents of strange passageways and closed rooms: sicut exposition ludus. As work on the quartet progressed I became aware that I was reading into, and behind the games, adult motives and implications, concerning aggression and war, with their consequences. It was impossible to escape into innocent childhood fantasy. The nature of the F to B progression underlying the whole construction derives from a passage in the development of the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony, and the opening of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. However, unlike in these models, here a real - if temporary - sense of resolution occurs at the close of the quartet: as when the curtain falls on the reconciled Count and Countess in 'Figaro' one wonders how long the F/B truce will hold, and games break out again. The quartet is dedicated to Giuseppe Rebecchini, Roman architect, and friend since the nineteen-fifties.

SKU: HL.14021004

ISBN 9780711941830.

Peter Maxwell Davies. A superb cycle of 7 songs depicting the hero/heroine's stay on Grandma's farm somewhere in the Orkneys one summer. The songs tell of the farm chores, nature and ghosts and are arranged for unison voices, piano, recorders and pitched or unpitched percussion. The songs can be used individually to link in with topic work or performed as an attractive concert item. 18 mins.

SKU: HL.14008384

ISBN 9781847723970. 8.25x11.75x0.149 inches.

The complete String Quartet score for Maxwell Davies' Quartet No.6. This work was commissioned by the Naxos Recording Company, and is the sixth in a series of ten quartets. It was first performed on 26th April 2005 at the Purcell Room, London by the Maggini Quartet.