The Eight Songs are 18-years old now, and the Maggot is 13, but their shock-value has not yet worn off. They are both studies of extreme mental states (the 'madness' of George III, the pathetic delusions of Eliza Donnithorne, Dickens's model for Miss Havisham), portrayed at the most obvious level by the use of extremes of vocal technique. In the Eight Songs the singer must be baritone and counter-tenor, must yelp and screech and howl and groan to portray not only the King's condition but the sound of his voice wrecked by his ceaseless ravings. Miss Donnithorne raves also, but the fact that she was for 30 years quite literally ''mad in white satin'' (after she was jilted she wore her wedding-dress for the rest of her life) has reminded Davies of Lucy of Lammermoor and all those other flute-attended prime donne of the nineteenth century; cue not only for some touching lyricism but for a number of disconcertingly deranged parodies of bel canto. These musical references are less overt than the Handelian foxtrot (the singer snarling through a loud-hailer) and the surreally juxtaposed baroque objets trouves of the Eight Songs, but Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, even so, strikes me as music-theatre while the Eight Songs are music-theatre. Perhaps for this reason one is left in no doubt of Davies's pity for his subject, despite the absurdity of her quasi-operatic swoopings and wobblings: there is an angular poignancy beneath all the extravagance of gesture, the insistent incessant intensity of utterance, and the purely musical invention has gravity as well as cleverness. Whereas in the Eight Songs, although Davies is certainly not treating us to the modern equivalent of an eighteenth-century dandy's visit to Bedlam to laugh at the lunatics, the primary impetus does seem to have been melodramatic: if we are drawn to pity the mad King it is not by anything in Davies's vivid, breathtakingly inventive but brittle score.
The performances are astonishingly accomplished (and the earlier of the two pieces is as much a pretext for astonishing performance as anything else). I do hope that the reason we seem to have heard little of Julius Eastman lately is not that he did himself a severe vocal mischief performing the Eight Songs. The fact that Mary Thomas is still in fine fettle after a dozen years impersonating Miss Donnithorne gives cause for optimism. The Fires of London, in both their 1970 and 1984 line-ups, play with extraordinary pungency and precision, and both recordings have an alarming immediacy.'