Maxwell Davies: Taverner

Opera no 82

Peter Maxwell Davies: Taverner

Soloists

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Oliver Knussen

This is a quite extraordinary work. I was aware of it and have some vague memories of the publicity for the first performance: it created quite a stir not only for its subject matter and use of renaissance instruments but also for the extreme modernity of the score. For an English composer to be writing such music in the 1960s (and some of the work was started in the late 1950s) was astonishing. What strikes me more than anything is the confidence with which a still young composer (he was in in his mid 30s when it was produced so much of the music was written in his 20s) mastered his material. The orchestral writing is  completely assured. It must have been an enormous challenge to the orchestra at the time (it sill is hair-raisingly difficult) but it does really pack a punch. Similarly the choral writing has a big impact, especially in the long polyphonic lines in the big ensemble in Act 1.

The solo vocal writing is perhaps harder to appreciate. Some of it seemed to me quite arid in the manner of the least effective bits of late Stravinsky, though elsewhere is was compelling.  Perhaps the most astonishing part of the score is the very end. All of the frenetic activity and hard edges disappears and we are left with a long slow passage for strings which doesn’t compromise in its harmonic language but does seem to hark back in some ways to the traditions of English string writing and beyond that to renaissance polyphony. 

Altogether this was a really good discovery. It was certainly challenging to listen to at times and I am glad I had a score to help me, but I am so pleased that at last I have got round to listening to it.

That’s the end of this part of my exploration of 20th century British opera: I will come back to it later in the year but now I will move on to something much easier on the ear - some of the lighter 19th century French repertoire.