Feature by Kenny Mathieson
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
Max’s Orkney Saga
SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES is one of the leading composers of his generation, and was the driving force behind the launch of the St Magnus Festival in 1977. Sir Peter talks to Kenny Mathieson about the festival, Orkney, and the newest developments in his work.
What was your role in the launch of the St Magnus Festival?
PMD: It was my idea, and my role was to get the ball rolling, along with Norman Mitchell, who was the organist at St Magnus Cathedral, and to write a piece for the opening of the festival. That was my opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus, which we did in the Cathedral on the first night of the first festival. It took off from there. Originally I had the idea of doing it basically as a thank you to the people of Orkney, who had welcomed me very warmly. I got a great deal from Orkney, its landscape and its seascape and its people, and I thought doing something of that kind would be both a very apposite way of presenting Orkney to a potentially large public, and also presenting classical music and whatever else was eventually included in the festival to the public in Orkney. It has also encouraged a great deal of grassroots musical and artistic activity on the island for both children and adults, which is wonderful.
Did you envisage that the festival would still be thriving 26 years on?
PMD: I didn’t know how it would go, to be honest. It could just have fizzled out, and I was quite prepared for that – I remember getting a letter from Ben Britten warning me that in his experience of launching his famous festival in Aldeburgh it was very difficult to involve the locals and get them on board. There was a lot of opposition in some quarters, just as Ben had warned me there would be. It was difficult in the early years, especially with the local newspaper launching a campaign against it, and BBC Radio Orkney showing no interest for the first ten years! You cope with these things, however, and it went on regardless. I had faith in it, and it worked. For the next one in 1978 I involved local school kids, and through them their parents. I had decided I would stay as director for a maximum of ten years, and then it must be handed over to people who were very strictly local, which is what happened when Glenys Hughes took over in 1986.
What do you think is the festival’s unique appeal?
PMD: It’s uniqueness lies firstly in its location, which is very splendid. It is very much a part of the life of the islands now. I think that is its real secret, and it’s rather splendid that lots of people have now more or less forgotten that I had originated it. It’s not remotely your average rent-a-festival. Indeed, one of the problems now is that some of the venues are just not big enough for the events, and people cannot get tickets.
Can you briefly sum up the influence Orkney itself had on you?
PMD: I went there first of all in 1970 and loved it. I met some marvellous people, like George Mackay Brown, and the place appealed so much that I borrowed a cottage which belonged to the doctor in Stromness. Meantime I had seen somewhere that I wanted to do up on Hoy. The problem was that it was about the most impractical place in the world. It was at the top of a cliff, miles away from the road, had no roof, windows or doors, and had a stream running through it. I moved in during 1974 having restored it with friends, and lived and worked there much of the time until 1996. I produced a hell of a lot of music there, very much influenced by the place itself, its legends and history, and also the people I got to know there, including Glenys Hughes, who now runs the festival, and certainly also the writings of George Mackay Brown. Given all of that, it really worked for me, and I just stayed and stayed and stayed.
Why have you turned recently to chamber music after many years of writing mainly orchestral works?
PMD: Over the last decade and more I’ve written a great deal of orchestral music, and I’ve done a fantastic amount of conducting, not only with the orchestras that I have had a composer-conductor relationship with, like the BBC Philharmonic, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra or the Royal Philharmonic in London, but all over the world. Eventually I came to feel that I wanted to do something completely different with a much tighter discipline. I think it is a very good thing to just change tack and do something you haven’t done before, or haven’t done much.
You have been commissioned to write ten String Quartets by Naxos Records. What is the appeal of that medium?
PMD: In a quartet you have four lines which have to do a fantastic amount of work – you can’t just bring in the brass when you run out of ideas! Not that I did that anyway, I would like to think! I’ve just finished the third of the Naxos Quartets, and am about to start No 4. I’m also writing a Septet for the Nash Ensemble, and I’ve just written a group of recorder pieces for a school on the island here. I’ve also written some piano music for beginners, which is something I’m very keen on. I very much enjoy writing music for educational purposes or for children to have fun with.
You seem to like to work in extended sequences of works, as in your ten Strathclyde Concertos for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, or the new Quartet series. Why is that?
PMD: The lovely thing with having a definite number like that is that you can think ahead and conceive it rather like someone writing a book in ten chapters. You can take ideas from an earlier quartet and develop them in a different way in a later quartet. The overall shape tends to develop as you go along, but always two quartets ahead. When I was writing the seven symphonies – the ‘Antarctica’ made eight, but was really outside that sequence, and was more of tone poem than anything else – it was only when I got to number four that I realised that it was going to be a cycle of about seven, which seemed the right number, and I was already planning ahead at that stage. All kinds of things conspire to change those plans to some extent, though. If something grabs your imagination unexpectedly, then you go with it.
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies will conduct the BBC Philharmonic in performances of his Maxwell’s Reel and Orkney Saga III at the Pickaquoy Centre, Kirkwall, in the opening concert of the St Magnus Festival on 20 June 2003.
© Kenny Mathieson, 2003
