‘One if by Land, Two if by Sea’ Maxwell Davies the Symphonist

Extract

‘One if by Land, Two if by Sea’… so ran the pre-arranged signals for Paul Revere's famous midnight ride. But what if three beacons had shone from the belfry? Confusing to history's nocturnal horseman, perhaps, but not to Peter Maxwell Davies, for whom landscape, seascape, and Renaissance church architecture have furnished the poetics of the first three works in what Paul Griffiths has called ‘the most important symphonic cycle since that of Shostakovitch’.