"...it will be Max's recent music – as opposed to the music he composed in the 50s and 60s – that will be his real legacy. For it is this that is a summation of a lifetime of listening in and with landscape, of being useful as a composer, a teacher, and an inspiration to his colleagues, and it is a visionary renewal of a richness of musical discourse that you might have thought impossible at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st." Tom Service
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was born in 1934 in Salford, Manchester. He studied with Richard Hall at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where together with Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr and John Ogdon he formed the New Music Manchester Group. He continued his studies with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome. Since the early 1970s he has made his home in the Orkney Islands north-west of the Scottish mainland.
Maxwell Davies' major works include the operas
Taverner,
Resurrection,
The Lighthouse and The Doctor of Myddfai; the full-length ballets
Salome and
Caroline Mathilde, and the music-theatre works
Eight Songs for a Mad King and
Miss Donnithorne's Maggot. His huge output of orchestral works includes eight symphonies - hailed by The Times as "the most important symphonic cycle since Shostakovich" - fourteen concertos, several light orchestral works including
An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise and
Mavis in Las Vegas, five large-scale works for chorus including the oratorio
Job. His most recent series is the landmark cycle of ten string quartets, the Naxos Quartets.
Maxwell Davies is also internationally active as a conductor, having held the position of Composer/Conductor with the Royal Philharmonic and the BBC Philharmonic. He has guest-conducted orchestras including the Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Russian National Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra. He retains close links with the St Magnus Festival, Orkney's annual arts festival which he founded in 1977, and is the Composer Laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Recent orchestral scores with Schott include
Last Door of Light for the Camerata Salzburg and Carinthischer Sommer,
Overture to St Fancis of Assisi for the BBC SSO as part of Glasgow's festival celebrating his 75th birthday in 2009, and
Reel of Spindrift, Sky for the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq (2011). Future plans include two further symphonies.
Maxwell Davies was appointed Master of the Queen's Music in 2004 in which role he has sought to raise the profile of music in Great Britain, as well as writing many works for Her Majesty the Queen and for royal occasions. He was given the Freedom of the City of Salford in 2004 and has received numerous honorary doctorates.
July 2010