In 1962, the 27-year-old Nicholas Maw staged a breathtaking musical coup at the Proms with his cantata Scenes and Arias – a voluptuous, very late-romantic synthesis of Strauss and Viennese expressionism, though with an undisguised English accent. Thirty-four years later it’s still his most widely admired work – high time somebody either recorded it afresh or reissued the old del Mar Argo version (10/69).
Scenes and Arias was a hard act to follow, and there’s still some disagreement about whether Maw has ever quite risen to that level again. So it’s good to find him trying something utterly different in Dance Scenes (1995) – this is unashamedly ‘light’ music, but of the most resourceful, invigorating kind, dodging cliches with the skill of a star centre forward. Where Scenes and Arias courted Schoenberg and Berg, and drank in the influence of Salome and Rosenkavalier – all heady, nocturnal stuff – Dance Scenes is daylight and fresh air, with the robust orchestral brilliance of Walton.
If there’s one chief guiding spirit, it’s the ‘American’ Hindemith. Harmonies, short phrases and long lines are steeped in Hindemith – no bad thing, since it seems to have breathed new life into Maw’s melodic invention. For me, one of the problems of the similarly popularist Spring Music (1983) is that it seems to be perpetually striving after a big tune that never arrives. If your idea of a ‘big tune’ stretches to include the lovely long melody Walton made the basis of his Variations on a theme of Hindemith, then you shouldn’t be disappointed here: the oboe tune introduced in the third dance is very beguiling, and its apotheosis (with a Waltonian fade-out just before the final flourish) should appeal to all but the most thickly insulated hearts. The Philharmonia Orchestra, who commissioned Dance Scenes, play as though it had thoroughly won them over, and the recording does performance and music justice. Could this become a repertory piece? Whatever, full marks to EMI for giving it a helping hand.'