PETER MAXWELL DAVIES'S ‘NAXOS’ QUARTETS

Extract

The path of a composer's career may include a number of unexpected twists and turns. Some of them may immediately seem to be quite radical, leaving many observers always in a state of thinking that the very last thing that the composer was doing was so much better than this new thing. Then, after time, in retrospect, the way is seen to have been straight and plain, rather than crooked and rough, and the development to have proceeded quietly with a consistent, internally logical progress, producing works whose commonality of artistic vision and structural procedure is more apparent than their more minor surface stylistic differences.