Significant concert activity planned to mark Sir Peter Maxwell Davies 75th birthday in 2009, including concert performances of Taverner in November by BBC SSO (UK).

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music in 2004.

Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle studied together at the Royal Northern College of Music where they founded the contemporary music touring ensemble the Pierrot Players (later renamed The Fires of London).

Maxwell Davies Lives in Sanday in the Orkney Islands which are located off the northern tip of Scotland where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet. Orkney is an archipelago of 70 or so islands; just 21 of them are inhabited.

This is Peter Maxwell Davies’ first release on the NMC label. To mark Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s 75th birthday NMC issue the long-awaited release of his seminal opera, Taverner.

This release is of the landmark 1997 BBC recording featuring an astonishing line up of the cream of British contemporary music interpreters, alongside specialist period instrument ensembles Fretwork and His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, conducted by Oliver Knussen. Although what is now known about the 16th-century English composer John Taverner differs considerably from the plot of this opera, the piece is both a fascinating study of an artist as a man for all seasons and an extraordinary indictment of the horrors inflicted on humanity by religion, or religious zealotry.

The Taverner of the opera abandons music to become a persecutor of the Catholic faith and thus betrays all that is good in himself. In Act 1 we see him being tried for heresy by the White Abbot and pardoned by the Cardinal (Wolsey) because of his music. In Act 2, which is a parody of the first, Taverner is trying the White Abbot, who is burned at the stake. That is the bare outline. A sub-plot is Henry VIII’s wish for a break with Rome in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon and the machinations of a Jester, otherwise Death, who controls Taverner’s fate.

Artists

Martyn Hill (Taverner), David Wilson-Johnson (Jester), Stephen Richardson (Henry VIII), Fiona Kimm (Virgin Mary), Michael Chance (Priest/God), Quentin Hayes (White Abbot) & Peter Sidhom (Richard Taverner)

Fretwork, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta Voices, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts & New London Children’s Choir, Oliver Knussen