Peter Maxwell Davies

Saw a performance of the fifth symphony a couple of years ago and it's astonishing, always meant to dig deeper with this guy and maybe this week I will. RIP.

Oh no :-(

RIP. Excellent score for The Devils, wish he'd written more film music.

Gotta hear that, and watch The Devils too.

I was trying to select a piece of his for the classical poll and Vesalii Icones is so good.

^that was the first piece by him i picked up... have only gotten into his stuff over the last year and a bit, & mostly just the sixties-early seventies work so far

some excellent footage included in the bfi devils dvd of the score being recorded too

Iffy obit:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/mar/14/sir-peter-maxwell-davies-obituary

This amazing productivity is actually an obstacle to the survival of his music. It is hard to know where to start, and plunging in at random may lead to one of the many grey patches in his music, particularly in the later works such as the Strathclyde concertos. But the expressionist works of the 60s seem more and more to be genuine masterpieces. Unlike the other shocking things of that era such as Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils (for which Maxwell Davies wrote the music), they have not dated.

One of the things you should do to 'survive' is to compose just enough but not too much.

I reckon The Devils is also 'expressionist' sounding, like there is this weird decade cut-off. I'm not sure why interest in it couldn't be revived at some later point.

Yeah I don't really get that, there are plenty of composers with fallow periods. If anything is likely to be an impediment to survival its a lack of consensus over what the masterpieces might be, but even then that can make exploration of a body of work more exciting.

holy crap, RIP. I literally only discovered him last night while trawling for rural horror oddities and today I see this thread.

Also Eight Songs.. is the clear starting point for PMD.

Maxwell Davies's personal website has reverted to a sample project in Beaver Builder, under the pensive rubric "Music is nice."