CLARINET AND SAXOPHONE MAGAZINE:
This is a most worthwhile and imaginatively programmed disc, with fine music expertly played. The Kreutzer Quartet present Maxwell Davies works for string quartet from 1952 (the earliest work on the disc, written when he was just 18), 1961, 1980, and 1987 (a revision of a piece from 1977). Their performances are exemplary and involving. They seem to bring out the essence of each, very different, quartet. Ian Pace plays the Five Pieces for Piano Op. 2 thoughtfully and sensitively. The set shows the strong influence of the European avant-garde on the composer at this time, tempered by a rather English restraint, which certainly disappeared from Davies’s music before long.

Of the works with clarinet, the Sonata for clarinet and piano from 1956-57 is the earliest. The liner notes tell us that it was first performed at Darmstadt in 1957 by Georgina Dobrée and the composer, and that the score was then lost, and rediscovered in 1983 by Kevin Corner. It is a substantial 3-movement work lasting just over 15 minutes, and is dedicated to Harrison Birtwistle, clarinettist and fellow student in Manchester. As with so many of his pieces, Davies places the slow movement last, beginning with a Moderato movement followed by an accelerating Allegro – Presto – Prestissimo, and closing with the Adagio – Lento molto. The Moderato has arching, expressive clarinet lines, clearly taking the Second Viennese School as a starting point. The piano supports, or opposes, for the most part with elaborate, decorative material. The two kinds of music gradually merge, dissolve and finally disappear with gentle wisps of sound in a most poetic way. The second movement has much intricate part writing for both instruments, and there is a deal of ebb and flow, again with a sense of overall restraint, belying the impression given by tempo indications at the head of the movement. The final Adagio integrates the clarinet and piano music much more than previously, with more unisons, shared phrases, echoes, and dialogue, closing with a poignant unaccompanied clarinet recitative. There is a sense of the elegiac and the reflective about the work as a whole, certainly in this performance, which is convincingly and enjoyably projected by Guy Cowley and Ian Pace. The Sonata is still worth programming, and stands up well after nearly fifty years. It is interesting as a very early example of Maxwell Davies’s writing for clarinet, a style that changed radically ten years on, but is also worthwhile in its own right.

Probably the clarinet work by this composer that is best known is Hymnos of 1967 for clarinet and piano, written for Alan Hacker and Stephen Pruslin. It was composed at the height of Max’s wildly expressionist period, and places the most extreme technical demands on both players. It also offers a serious musical challenge. Whilst the compositional devices are elaborate and complex, they are not readily perceived; the overall impression is a kaleidoscope of extremes of gesture, on both an intimate and a large scale. Extremes of tempo, dynamics, durations, articulation, range, complexity of material, confront the players at every turn. It is not a piece for the faint-hearted player - or listener. Cowley and Pace throw themselves into it with commitment, and the result is often exciting. Listen to the playing in the fourth section, for instance, where the clarinet scampers in spectacular fashion through a tortuous, frantic, highly articulated high-lying line over rapid piano repetitions and punctuations. It sounds very much as if the recording was made in huge’ takes’ to achieve this sense of involved performance, and all credit to both players for doing this admirably. However, in many senses the piece stands or falls by the detail. There needs to be a clearer gradation of dynamics, for instance between the different levels of forte and piano to give more sense of the rapidly changing colours; and many of the clarinet slurs are missed, giving a more disjointed feel to certain passages, thus losing the (often very brief) melodic content and contrast. This is most noticeable in one section of movement nine, which does not project the expressive line captured so well in the first movement of the early Sonata on this disc. There is a misjudgement in the final page, where the powerful recitando notes that lead up to the famous clarinet top Eb are played much faster and less emphasised than marked. Consequently this huge gesture (possibly the most extreme, even in Maxwell Davies’s OTT style at this time) to which the previous pages (spectacularly played by both artists) have been leading, and from which the music never recovers in the closing few bars, does not make its necessary climactic impact.

The Seven Brightnesses for solo clarinet of 1975 lasting 6 1⁄2 minutes, again written for Alan Hacker, shows Guy Cowley’s adventurous approach. It is a fiendishly difficult work, not least because the range extends upwards from top C eventually reaching a high G (an octave above Beethoven 8). He presents these with the right sense of brinkmanship. Whilst not all the multiphonics are successful, (and there may be a misunderstanding of the fact that harmonics are gradually to be added near the end), there is a sense of performance about the piece, and the excitement of a player taking on a huge challenge. After some anodyne recording this is refreshing, and throughout the performances of the clarinet works one feels one is at a live event, with all the risks that are entailed in repertoire as demanding as this.

It is a pity to my ears that The Seven Brightnesses follows on directly after Hymnos (despite a long silence). I would have preferred the two pieces to be separated by Little Quartet 1 and Little Quartet 2, which follow.
unknown reviewer

GRAMOPHONE:
Despite being limited to music for piano, clarinet and string quartet, this programme gives a remarkably clear picture of Peter Maxwell Davies's art. In the short 1952 Quartet Movement, the 18-year-old composer handles complex polyrhythms with aplomb and individually. The Five Piano Pieces and the Clarinet Sonata show him, in the middle of the 1950s, handling post-Webern extended serialism in a very personal way. We hear tranquil, sparse episodes, sudden tempestuous outbursts, and more generally speaking ideas that are very precisely and distinctively articulated. Maxwell Davies creates a powerful sense of space, as in a landscape painting where subtle gradations of light and colour create effects of distance and atmosphere. This quality is just as apparent in the last of the Piano Pieces as at the end of the Little Quartet no. 1 or in The Seven Brightnesses, with its extraordinary, gleaming high notes.

The two works from the 1960s could hardly be more different from such angular, painterly works: the String Quartet is tranquil for the most part, and expressively quite cool; Hymnos, belonging to the same period as music theatre works like Revelation and Fall and Eight Songs for a Mad King, full of extreme, expressionistic contrasts. Guy Cowley and Ian Pace's playing is strong and well controlled, though they do not neglect the necessary touch of wildness that characterised the original performances and recording by Alan Hacker and Stephen Pruslin. All the playing, indeed, is excellent - the Kreutzer Quartet's pure tone and fine intonation are great assets in the pared-down idiom of the two Little Quartets. With realistic, sensitive recording, this is a must for anyone interested in Maxwell Davies.
Duncan Druce

INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW:
Having announced that his next compositional phase is to be based around chamber music, and with the recent premieres of his Piano Trio and First 'Naxos' Quartet, now is a good time to take stock of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's earlier chamber output. This new disc, a chronological succession of pieces from 1952 to 1980, enables the listener to do so.

The Quartet Movement (1952) vivaciously fuses Classical development and pre-Classical repetition in an idiom evoking Bartók and Stravinsky, which models resurface a quarter century on in the Little Quartets . Written in 1977 and 1980, though the First was 'lost in the post' and recomposed in 1987 as the Second, they almost constitute an integral quartet: the three-movement No. 1 - plaintive Andante , folksy Allegro and elegiac Lento - complemented by the through-composed No. 2, its wistful Adagio returning to round off a deftly scored Allegro moderato .

Completed in 1956, the Five Piano Pieces - Maxwell Davies's second and last work with opus number - combine aspects of his nascent maturity with facets of Viennese serialism refracted through Darmstadt practice. The lengthy third piece sounds disconcertingly like serial 'swing', while the final pieces draws together elements of its predecessors to thoughtful, if inconclusive, effect. Ian Pace renders them less forcefully but surely more accurately than John Odgon on a long-deleted EMI recording, and ably partners Guy Cowley in the long-mislaid Clarinet Sonata . Dating from a year later, this broadens but does not necessarily refine the stylistic range - though the Bergian intensity of the final Adagio more than anticipates the Expressionism of the Taverner years. Theatrical elements were seldom absent from Maxwell Davies's instrumental works over the decade from the mid-1960s. Hymnos (1967) is a stark abstract drama between clarinet and piano, with The Seven Brightnesses (1975) a symmetrically arranged monologue for clarinet alone. Cowley plays superbly in both, though it would be good to see Alan Hacker's pioneering versions (on L'Oiseau-Lyre and Nato) returned to the catalogue.

However, the most pressing reason for acquiring the disc is the 1961 String Quartet - a masterpiece of controlled, fluid momentum here receiving its first recording. Like other works from this period (notably Leopardi Fragments and O Magnum Mysterium), the presence of Monteverdi's Vespers is felt in the way a 'cantus' line threads its way through highly differentiated textures - providing a flexible framework for the melismatic detail which gives the music its expressive intensity. The Kreutzer Quartet's often almost vibrato-less playing strikes a note of somewhat post-a priori authenticity, but their keenness of response here and in the other quartet works is something the Margin Quartet will be hard pressed to match - should they record them as part of their Naxos cycle.

Recorded with an ideal combination of spaciousness and clarity, and with a booklet note combining overview and observations from the players, this is a timely disc - and not just on account of Maxwell Davies's somewhat depleted representation in the current catalogue.
Graham Simpson

THE SUNDAY TIMES: (one of the Records of the Year 2003)
Quartet Movement, written in Davies's late teens, is part of a work rejected by the Society for the Promotion of New Music and burnt in anger. These 152 seconds were salvaged from sketches, and compelling they are: a brilliant play with hectic scales and cross rhythms. Five Piano Pieces, Op 2, are from a few years later, as is the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. Both works are dense in the Boulezian manner, but are given here with exemplary lucidity. The 1961 String Quartet is a masterpiece, uniting the neo-medieval and neo-Mahlerian in Davies's totally original way. Also included are the two Little Quartets and the Hymnos for clarinet and piano.
Paul Driver