Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is writing a series of ten concertos for members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he is Associate Conductor/Composer. They will be seen, no doubt (especially since some of them will have several soloists), as his Brandenburg Concertos, but they will in fact be called the Strathclyde Concertos (Strathclyde Regional Council is playing an important part in commissioning and recording them), and indeed what is immediately obvious from the first two of them is the degree to which Davies has become a Scottish composer. The predominantly lyrical Cello Concerto begins with melodic lines derived from observations of the flight of birds, but its finale's energy is fuelled by a not very submerged Scottish dance. The Oboe Concerto is one of his most frankly plainchant-based pieces (the melody in question, a Whitsun-tide chant, is heard undisguised at the outset), but here too there are hints and more than hints of folk music.
There are hints also (both works are in three movements, both use a Mozart-sized orchestra) of classical concerto models, but anyone looking for the ghosts of sonata-form structures referred to in the accompanying notes may be hard put to it to hear them. Davies's harmonic language is now so rich and so subtly allusive, his metric patterning so fluid that a sort of rhythmic and tonal rubato is built into the music, an ebbing and flowing, slackening and tautening that makes the structure and the sense of movement, to this listener, curiously elusive. It is hard, perhaps barking up the wrong tree, to say of such ordered music that it is best to listen to it as though it were Delius, enjoying its beauties and taking its formal logic for granted. I am already haunted by music from both works: the darkly beautiful duet for the soloist and bass clarinet at the end of the Cello Concerto's slow movement, the wonderfully ingenious summarizing coda of the Oboe Concerto, the gravity and eloquence of much of that work's slow movement. But I am disturbed by a certain monotony, a sort of lean and graceful but less than urgent lyricism that pervades both pieces. Maybe the ghosts of sonata form, the fluidly changing multiple 'tonics' and 'dominants' referred to in the notes really do firmly underpin the elegant surfaces, but I have not heard them yet. I may very well be wrong or listening wrongly, admirers of Davies's music should certainly hear these two concertos. In performance as beautiful and as polished as these the task of searching out their secrets should not be an onerous one, even if one listener has so far found it difficult and only intermittently rewarding.'