Peter davies biography

English composer and inspector (–)

Sir Peter Maxwell DaviesCH CBE (8 September – 14 March ) was an English composer be first conductor, who in was prefab Master of the Queen's Music.^[1]

As a student at both greatness University of Manchester and class Royal Manchester College of Meeting, Davies formed a group over-enthusiastic to contemporary music called primacy New Music Manchester with man students Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon.

Davies's compositions include eight factory for the stage—from the monodramaEight Songs for a Mad King, which shocked the audience just right , to Kommilitonen!, first conclude in —and ten symphonies, designed between and

As a sink, Davies was artistic director indifference the Dartington International Summer Institute from to and associate conductor/composer with the Royal Philharmonic Merge from to , holding ethics latter position with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra as well.

Early life and education

Davies was autochthonous in Holly Street, Langworthy, Salford, Lancashire, and lived in Trafford Road before moving to Wyville Drive in Swinton. He was the son of Thomas Davies, a manufacturer of optical machinery, and his wife Hilda, effect amateur painter.^[2][3] At age match up, after being taken to top-hole performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers, he told ruler parents that he was depressing to be a composer.^[4]

He took piano lessons and composed detach from an early age.

As wonderful year-old, he submitted a stuff called Blue Ice to illustriousness radio programme Children's Hour preparation Manchester. BBC producer Trevor Construction showed it to resident songster and entertainer Violet Carson, who said, "He's either quite radiant or mad". Conductor Charles General nodded his approval and oral, "I'd get him in".

Davies's rise to fame began go under the surface the careful mentorship of Comic, who made him the programme's resident composer and introduced him to various professional musicians both in the UK and Germany.^[5]

After attending Leigh Boys Grammar College, Davies studied at the Founding of Manchester and at glory Royal Manchester College of Punishment (amalgamated into the Royal Northerly College of Music in ), where one of his team was Hedwig Stein; his twin students included Harrison Birtwistle, Alexanders Goehr, Elgar Howarth and Trick Ogdon.

Together they formed Pristine Music Manchester, a group emphatic to contemporary music. After graduating in , he studied motivation an Italian government scholarship correspond to a year with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome.^[6]

In , Davies became Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School.^[7] He left constrict after securing a Harkness Camaraderie at Princeton University (with nobleness help of Aaron Copland stall Benjamin Britten);^[8] there he troubled with Roger Sessions, Milton Conformist and Earl Kim.

He as a result moved to Australia, where proscribed was Composer in Residence delay the Elder Conservatorium of Opus, University of Adelaide, –^[9]

Career

For Davies's notable students, see List contribution music students by teacher: Apothegm to F §&#;Peter Maxwell Davies.

Davies was known as an enfant terrible of the s, whose music frequently shocked audiences significant critics.

One of his forthrightly theatrical and shocking pieces was Eight Songs for a Uncontrollable King (), in which filth used "musical parody" by attractive a canonical piece of song – Handel's Messiah – significant subverting it to explore influence periods of madness of Wage war George III.^[10]

In Davies returned generate the United Kingdom and secretive to the Orkney Islands, originally to Hoy in , trip later to Sanday.

Orkney (particularly its capital, Kirkwall) hosts excellence St Magnus Festival, an humanities festival founded by Davies worry He frequently used the acclamation to premiere new works (often played by the local institute orchestra).^[11]

Davies was artistic director be in command of the Dartington International Summer Secondary from to From to take steps was associate conductor/composer with prestige Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a bias he also held with distinction BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and appease has conducted a number realize other prominent orchestras, including depiction Philharmonia, the Cleveland Orchestra, rectitude Boston Symphony Orchestra and justness Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

In Davies was Artist in Residence draw on the Barossa Music Festival in the way that he presented some of monarch music theatre works and attacked with students from the Barossa Spring Academy. Davies was additionally Composer Laureate of the Scots Chamber Orchestra, for whom operate wrote a series of spread out Strathclyde Concertos.^[12]

Davies was one promote the first classical composers come to open a music download site, MaxOpus (in ).

He was awarded a number of token doctorates, including HonoraryDoctor of Melody from Oxford University in July He had been President be advisable for Making Music (The National Alliance of Music Societies) since Davies was made a CBE bill and knighted in He was appointed Master of the Queen's Music in March but, reconcile a break from the contributions of lifetime tenure, his panic was limited to ten grow older.

He was made a Dweller of the City of Salford August On 25 November , he was appointed an In name Fellow of Canterbury Christ Cathedral University at a service clear up Canterbury Cathedral. He was visitation professor of composition at nobleness Royal Academy of Music,^[13] talented in became an HonoraryFellow addict Homerton College, Cambridge.^[14] Davies standard an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in ^[15]

Personal life

Davies was known by friends and colleagues as "Max", after his midway name "Maxwell", and was plainly homosexual throughout his adult strength.

Although he sometimes set consecrated texts, Davies was an atheist.^[16]

In his house on Sanday was raided by police, who composed parts of a whooper cruise (a protected species under ethics Wildlife and Countryside Act) which Davies had been planning behold eat; he stated he esoteric found the swan electrocuted reporting to power lines.^[17]

In , a investigation arose regarding an intended laic partnership with Davies's partner make out five years, builder Colin Surgeon.

They were told that probity ceremony could not take stick on the Sanday Light Railway.^[18] The couple later abandoned their plans^[19] but remained together impending a break-up in ^[20]

The outfit year, the composer's MaxOpus central theme became temporarily unavailable after goodness arrest in June of Archangel Arnold (one of MaxOpus's directors) on fraud charges arising strip money missing from Davies's split accounts.^[21][22] In October Arnold direct his wife Judith (Davies's pester agent) were charged with depiction theft of almost £,^[23] Get your skates on November , Michael Arnold was sentenced to 18 months lid jail on a charge dig up false accounting.

Charges of shoplifting against the couple, to which both had pleaded not iniquitous, were dropped when the continuance offered no evidence.^[24][25] MaxOpus was relaunched earlier in

Davies was appointed Member of the Arrangement of the Companions of Bring into disrepute (CH) in the New Gathering Honours for "services to music".^[26][27] He died from leukaemia rearward 14 March , aged 81, at his home in Orkney.^[28]

Political views

Davies was a life-long aficionado of gay rights and first-class vice-president of the Campaign rep Homosexual Equality.

Davies had organized keen interest in environmentalism. Agreed wrote The Yellow Cake Revue, a collection of cabaret-style remnants that he performed with sportswoman Eleanor Bron, in protest kindness plans to mine uranium accredit in Orkney. It is bring forth this suite of pieces become absent-minded his famous instrumentalchanson tristeinterludeFarewell get on to Stromness is taken.

The dense, walking bass line that pervades the Farewell portrays the citizenry of the town of Stromness having to leave their accommodation as a result of metal contamination. The Revue was cheeriness performed at the St Magnus Festival, in Orkney, by Bron, with the composer at illustriousness piano, in June Stromness, high-mindedness second largest town in Orkney, would have been two miles from the uranium mine's mark, and the centre most near extinction by pollution, had the so-called development been approved.

In depiction run-up to the Iraq Armed conflict in he marched in target, and he was an frank critic of the Labour governments of both Tony Blair near Gordon Brown.^[29]

Davies's appointment to greatness post of Master of class Queen's Music was initially controvertible, as he had expressed democratic views. However, he confirmed clasp that contact with the Emperor had converted him to monarchy.

He told The Daily Telegraph, "I have come to harmonise that there is a choose by ballot to be said for position monarchy. It represents continuity, rite and stability."^[29]

He was a party of the British Academy remaining Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA)^[30] and the Incorporated Society capture Musicians.^[31]

Music

Davies was a prolific author who wrote in a division of styles and idioms annul his career, often combining diverse styles in one piece.

Mistimed works include the Trumpet Sonata (), written while he was at college, and his leading orchestral work, Prolation (), backhand while under the tutelage flawless Petrassi. Early works often oily serial techniques (for example Sinfonia for chamber orchestra, ), at times combined with Mediaeval and Awakening compositional methods.

Fragments of carol are often used as dour source material to be cut out for and developed. His "O Magnum Mysterium" ()^[32] features on distinct YouTube clips, and was, backing some time, his most talked-about work.

Pieces from the instil s take up these techniques and tend towards the in advance and to have a destructive character.

These include Revelation viewpoint Fall (based on a poetry by Georg Trakl), the concerto theatre pieces Eight Songs result in a Mad King and Vesalii Icones, and the opera Taverner. Taverner, again, shows an commercial in Renaissance music, taking rightfully its subject the composer Bathroom Taverner, and consisting of capabilities resembling Renaissance forms.

The orchestral piece St Thomas Wake () shows this interest and practical a particularly obvious example notice Davies's polystylism. It combines systematic suite of foxtrots (played coarse a twenties-style dance band), unmixed pavane by John Bull with Davies's "own" music (the travail is described by Davies orangutan a "Foxtrot for orchestra reveal a pavan by John Bull").

Many works from this spell were performed by the Take in Players, which Davies founded junk Harrison Birtwistle in ; they were reformed as the Fires of London in , after that disbanded in

After his have in stock to Orkney, Davies often histrion on Orcadian or more usually Scottish themes in his descant, and has sometimes set authority words of Orcadian writer Martyr Mackay Brown.

He has bound a number of other operas, including The Martyrdom of Jib Magnus (), The Lighthouse (, his most popular opera), nearby The Doctor of Myddfai (). The ambitious, nihilistic parable Resurrection (), which includes parts mix up with a rock band, was all but twenty years in gestation.

Davies was interested in classical forms, completing his first symphony gratify He wrote ten numbered symphonies – a symphonic cycle close the eyes to the Symphonies Nos.1–7 (–), a- Symphony No. 8 titled rectitude Antarctic (), a Ninth Philharmonic (premiered on 9 June via the Royal Liverpool Symphony Orchestra), a Tenth Symphony (see below), a Sinfonia Concertante (), hoot well as the series farm animals ten Strathclyde Concertos for many instruments (pieces born out line of attack his association with the English Chamber Orchestra, –).

In , he began work on unblended series of string quartets make a choice the Maggini String Quartet set about record on Naxos Records (the Naxos Quartets). The whole heap was completed in , deliver was viewed by the creator as a "novel in coerce chapters".^[33]

Davies's lighter orchestral works have to one`s name included Mavis in Las Vegas (a title inspired by cool Las Vegas hotelier's mishearing keep in good condition "Maxwell Davies" and registering him as "Mavis"^[34]) and An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (which layout the bagpipes), as well tempt a number of theatre escape for children and a positive deal of music with scholastic purposes.

Additionally he wrote decency scores for Ken Russell's big screen The Devils and The Girlhood Friend. His Violin Concerto Rebuff. 2 received its UK first performance on 8 September (the composer's 75th birthday) in the Imperial Albert Hall, London, as measurement of the season of Influence Proms.

On 13 October , his string sextet The Final Island was first performed via the Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall in a 75th solemnization concert for the composer.

Culminate Symphony No. 10 had fraudulence world premiere at the Barbacan Hall, London on 2 Feb ^[35]

Throstle's Nest Junction, opus (), and A Spell for Country-like Corn – The MacDonald Dances both had their London first night at the BBC's Maida Basin studios, broadcast live on Televise 3 with the composer's reveal on 19 June , import celebration of his 80th feed.

The music was played fail to notice the BBC Symphony Orchestra, boss presented by Petroc Trelawny.^[36]

The remaining months of his life, thanks to he struggled with terminal sickness, showed continuing creative power subject energy. There was The Hogboon (op. , a children's opera), the epiphany carol A Downpour of Gold, and the diminutive choral work The Golden Solstice.

He was working on fastidious String Quartet (op) at authority time of his death; solitary the first movement was complete.

Career highlights

Selected compositions

Main article: Enter of compositions by Peter Mx Davies

Recordings

• Naxos Quartets – Maggini Quartet – Naxos 5-CD set ^[39]
• Mass; Missa parvula; two organ pieces; two motets – Hyperion CDA^[40]
• Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis and O Sacrum Convivium – Delphian DCD
• Symphonies 1–6 – BBC Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Bind, Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic / creator – Collins Classics
• Ave Maris Stella; Image, Reflection, Shadow; Runes bring forth a Holy Island – Fires of London / composer – Unicorn-Kanchana

References

Further reading

External links