This hauntingly beautiful chamber opera is one of the finest of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's Orkney-inspired pieces (it opened the first St Magnus Festival there in 1977) and of all his stage works it seems especially well suited to recording. Certainly in the present performance, based on a staging that has toured extensively over the last two years, it grips from the very first moment, an unaccompanied vocal line emerging from silence and apparent darkness, and doesn't let go for the whole of the opera's 72-minute span. The secret, I suppose, lies in the intense and extremely concentrated lyricism of the work's language, rooted as it almost always audibly is in plainchant.
I say 'the work's language' because its sound-world, though obviously related to Davies's other music, is very individual. This may have something to do with the particular character of the chant that he used, certainly with his striking use of solo instrumental timbres to evoke mood and sketch character. These are heard most obviously in the scene of the Satanic temptation of Magnus, where each of the enticements set before him has its own alluring obbligato, but elsewhere they are much more than mere identifying signals. To some degree the trumpet and the viola that are associated with Magnus himself 'represent' respectively the violence which destroys him and his Christ-like rejection of it, while the blind seer Mary's guitar is a bardic lyre, her flute an extension of her prophetic voice.
The prevailing texture, bare but intense monody with often a single-line accompaniment, gives maximum drama to those moments that depart from it, so that martial ceremony can be vividly evoked by the incursion of a mere pair of trumpets and a glitter of percussion, and the brief dissonant chords for the full instrumental force, signalling Magnus's martyrdom, can be almost gruesomely overwhelming. The lyrical concentration, every note seeming to have an expressive function, makes the drama's forward progress so inexorable that it would be painful to pause half-way through. Not that the opera is in any way musically ascetic. George Mackay Brown's novel, upon which it is based, takes place in the present as well as in Magnus's twelfth century, giving Davies a pretext for one of his most vivid but at the same time most telling games of musical pastiche, the opera hurtling through several centuries of musical history so that television war correspondents can give news flashes on an abortive peace conference between Magnus and Hakon. But the overriding impression is of a ritualized mystery play, enacted at the Saint's shrine (where the final scene is set and where the first performance indeed took place), the music recognizably rooted in and returning to liturgy. It is indeed a church parable, like Britten's, and at least comparable to those in musical quality.
The performance is a fine one, splendidly paced and of powerful impetus; the recording is extremely clear, yet spacious and very atmospheric.'