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Maxwell Davies, P.: Naxos Quartets Nos. 7 and 8

Maxwell Davies, P.: Naxos Quartets Nos. 7 and 8

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MAXWELL DAVIES Quartets: No. 7, “Metafore sul Borromini”; No. 8 • Maggini Qrt • NAXOS 8.557399 (72:35)


The music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has always given the impression that it brooks no compromise. It is meticulously organized, often by principles outside music itself. The result may strike some as arid or over-intellectual, but it is, in fact, just these self-imposed restraints that allow the composer to explore unremarked possibilities and overlooked corners in the sound world he has chosen. Maxwell Davies’s small gestures make big music.


The remarkable commission by Naxos for 10 string quartets from Maxwell Davies continues. This most recent pair is one of great contrast. No. 7, “Metafore sul Borromini,” is Maxwell Davies’s tribute to six churches by the 16th-century Roman architect, Francesco Borromini. While Maxwell Davies explicitly refuses the comparison of his seven-part quartet with Haydn’s Seven Words , the listener will sense a relationship nonetheless in the generally slow tempos and subdued character of all the movements. Maxwell Davies has two gestures with which he impels much of this music: one is a frequent use of the tritone (F? to C, for instance), an interval traditionally thought unstable, but one with which he plays as if it were completely everyday. His other habit is to compound his larger forms out of many, smaller, contrasting, blocks. Both of these techniques are in evidence here, even within the relatively short movements of this quartet. That said, this is muscular music: listen especially to the last movement. Synesthesia is a difficult experience to bring off but the almost 54 minutes of this quartet offer a kaleidoscope of color that is gripping, even in a recording.


Appropriately, No. 8 is dedicated, by the master of the Queen’s music, to Queen Elizabeth II on her 80th birthday. To comply with the requirement that each pair fill one CD, this quartet, in one movement, lasts about 19 minutes. In his extensive notes to this disc, Maxwell Davies avers: “After the intense and brooding nature . . . of No. 7, something brighter and more airy was in order.” While I am not sure these are quite the terms with which I would characterize this quartet at first hearing, in the context of No. 7, it is more open, if not more airy. The organizing material comes out of John Dowland’s Queen Elizabeth’s Galliard , partly in tribute to the Queen, of course, but also as a remembrance for Maxwell Davies of the importance of the music of this period for him as a composer. Maxwell Davies uses here a technique that was especially common in his early music of taking a theme and using it in bits, but not letting it be completely heard until the end of the piece. Here, Dowland’s full tune does not emerge until 15 minutes into the quartet.


These quartets are not mere intellectual exercises; least of all No. 7 (though one could get that impression from his program notes). They will take any serious listener, and not just those of the “contemporary music” crowd, on an inveigling sound journey, not by their novelty, but by their conviction. For, in the end, this is sensuous music, as all music must be.


All the Naxos quartets have been composed for the Maggini Quartet and Maxwell Davies knows their strengths intimately by now, and writes to them. The Seventh Quartet especially is a fine addition to the repertoire and bears repeated listening. This music is convincingly played and well recorded.


FANFARE: Alan Swanson
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Product Description:

  • Release Date: April 24, 2007


  • UPC: 747313239924


  • Catalog Number: 8557399


  • Label: Naxos


  • Number of Discs: 1


  • Composer: Peter, Maxwell Davies


  • Orchestra/Ensemble: Maggini Quartet


  • Performer: MAGGINI QUARTET