Peter Maxwell Davies has written more concertos than most, but this is his first for the most popular of all concerto instruments. It is dedicated to Kathryn Stott, whom he has heard in a wide range of repertory (including a Mozart concerto that he conducted); he says that “much of the piano writing is related exactly to how she plays”. Just so, and he might have added “and to what she evidently enjoys playing”. It is a virtuoso piece, with florid solo writing in both the outer movements, and a deal of grand pianistic rhetoric. Maxwell Davies’s language now has strong tonal pulls (the slow movement even has a key signature – C sharp minor) and so, despite his characteristic technique of constant thematic transformation, the work has, even at first hearing, many of the attributes one expects of a virtuoso concerto, even of a romantic one. When amply melodious slower music appears in the orchestra about eight minutes into the first movement, for example, you know without needing to be told that the piano (in fact after a fast and dramatic ‘middle section’) will eventually and most satisfyingly take it up. The poised, cantabile melody for the soloist that opens the slow movement will, you feel quite sure, be first embellished, then intensified by the orchestra and built to a climax with magisterial piano gestures, and that is precisely what happens. The finale, of course, as well as a fantastically various richness of event, has a cadenza, brilliant toccata figures and a whirl of octave runs.
The Piccolo Concerto (in both senses: its total duration is less than the Piano Concerto’s first movement) is full of long-lined lyricism and dazzling brightness, but the piccolo’s thinness of tone is also dramatically and effectively set against orchestral mass and its high lines often hover above cavernous depths. Maxwell’s Reel, with Northern Lights is another of Maxwell Davies’s exuberant lighter pieces, like An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, and it could prove just as popular. He once walked to a musical evening at the village hall in Hoy, near where he lives, and saw the aurora borealis gleaming and pulsing, sometimes in time with the music emerging from the hall, sometimes not. The effect is vividly caught: a set of variations on a genuine strathspey tune (one or two of them sounding oddly and agreeably like Copland – “Orcadian Spring”), accelerating uproariously into a fractured reel until the lights in the sky make their own music. Excellent performances; I could have done with a little more impact to the piano sound, but the recordings are otherwise good.'