This is a useful record, which not only makes available some of Maxwell Davies's most recent music (notably the Caroline Mathilde suite, which can also be found on Collins Classics's 20th Century Plus label—reviewed in March) but also fills one of the major gaps in Maxwell Davies recordings.
St Thomas Wake (1969) belongs to Maxwell Davies's 'Ken Russell' period, when he was providing the scores for such films as The Devils and The Boy Friend, and introducing explicit quotation and savage parody of all sorts of music in his concert works. St Thomas Wake ultimately derives from a keyboard pavan by John Bull, but, as the subtitle—''Foxtrot for orchestra''—indicates, the symphony orchestra's serious symphonic music (in the composer's most intense neo-expressionist manner, is offset by a sequence of foxtrots played by a dance band. The effect is disturbing and thought-provoking on many levels, even in a recording subject to the stresses and strains of live performance, with a balance that leaves the crucial 'honky-tonk' piano far too disembodied.
The quotations, transformations and superimpositions of the Caroline Mathilde ballet music are evidently by the same hand as St Thomas Wake, although the conflicts are less radical and the atmosphere less menacing, not least because the constraints of ballet have led to a simpler rhythmic profile. But the two shorter pieces on the disc, which could hardly be more different from each other, are both vintage Max. The Threnody makes a virtue of extreme brevity, gradually intensifying, then ending with the abruptness of an all-too-pressing grief. The Ojai Festival Overture, by total contrast, is a kind of hoe-down with barely a hint of an Orkney accent (Ojai is in California), complete with an expansive contrasting theme, yet quite avoiding the embarrassments of a sub-Copland, or even a sub-Bernstein style. Maxwell Davies has always been able to lighten his idiom without trivializing it, and this delightful overture proves that the master has not lost his touch.'