Peter Maxwell Davies - Symphonies (Collins Classics)

Hello buddies! This is no my rip but knowing that those cds are really hard to find at reasonable prices, I thought on sharing those ones despite they are not in lossless format. I also want to thank the great work done by WMM, the original uploader.

ID Maxwell Davies Symphony No. 5". Five Klee Pictures". Chat Mossb. Cross Lane Fairb. 'Philharmonia Orchestra; BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.
Collins Classics 0 CD 1460-2 (57 minutes: DDD).

Maxwell Davies's Fifth Symphony is his shortest yet, and his most accessible: it has fine tunes, powerful rhythmic impetus and grandeur of scale. It is also in some ways his most ambiguous. The accompanying notes suggest three ways of 'reading' it: as a fusion of the Beethovenian (stability/ instability) and Sibelian (slow growth from within) symphonic principles, as a mosaic of 34 'moments' that combine and interlock into larger structures, and as a single movement in two contrasting but linked halves. So far I've found the last the most useful: near the middle of the symphony, after a powerful climax, there is a still centre of hushed and very beautiful lyrical string writing. On second hearing you realize that there are kindred passages throughout the work, more frequent in the latter half, where they often punctuate music of striding vigour. It is a question of types of music rather than conventional 'subjects', and we can observe those types forming, growing and changing in a two-part structure that makes satisfying sense despite the fact that it is all development, with no 'recapitulation'. It is indeed a masterly postSibelian single movement, with moments of craggy splendour and driving energy at just the points where Sibelius would have put them. The sym phony's immediate impact is very powerful, but already at a second hearing it grows wonderfully. I seem to have been using the word 'masterpiece' quite a lot recently to describe Maxwell Davies's symphonies, but I've never been so confident of it as in this case. MED - Gramophone - June 1995