Peter Maxwell Davies

Summary

‘Living with music in a creative way is for me almost a physical necessity.’

For a few years during the 1990s I was involved in the musical life of Nottingham by interviewing conductors or soloists, usually by telephone, shortly before they came to the city to perform in a concert. Each interview was then printed in the concert programme alongside the more formal note about the evening's concerto or symphonic work. In August 1996 Sir Peter Maxwell Davies visited Nottingham in his role as guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to conduct a concert that included his Sixth Symphony, only recently premiered at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney and not yet heard in London, and because I’d already interviewed him about the Symphony I was asked to host his pre-concert talk. It was therefore essential that I attend the afternoon rehearsal of the Symphony.

He’d told me in the phone interview,

I’m always very keen to conduct my pieces for audiences that possibly don't get much new music. It's very important that they have a chance to come to terms with an orchestra playing these works physically in front of them rather than listening to a CD. The experience is quite different.

And, for me, the experience of hearing the Sixth Symphony being rehearsed was challenging. I remember feeling bewildered by the first movement but greatly moved by the last, which had a remarkable sense of inevitability about it. I also remember that during the evening performance a number of people in the audience walked out at the end of the first movement, and that Sir Peter, hearing the disruption in the hall, turned around, folded his hands in front of him and smiled resignedly until the early leavers had gone.

Fast-forward to March 2014, shortly before my encounter with him for this book, when I listened to the Symphony for the first time in many years and discovered that most of my difficulties with it had evaporated. I was left wondering what my ‘problem’ had been. And I told him this when we met at the Royal Academy of Music in London – in a top-floor flat used by visiting professors, off a quiet side street at the back of the main building.