What an agreeable way to end a cycle of ten concertos. The Tenth is a Concerto for Orchestra, rather symphony-like with a stormy, propulsive opening allegro and a grave slow movement whose lyrical eloquence rises to great heights before its opening is recalled, but with no sense of finality. The finale, though, is both an uproarious end-of-cycle party (a jig, with more than a passing resemblance to “Ding! Dong! The witch is dead” from The Wizard of Oz) and a nostalgic retrospect: each of the soloists of the previous nine concertos step forward, in order, for a brief cadenza. The jig resumes, but the ending suggests that Maxwell Davies is just a little sad that the series is over, and that anyway he never did get round to writing a concerto for timpani.
The Ninth Concerto is for those instruments that never got much more than a passing solo in the previous eight: piccolo, alto flute, cor anglais, E flat clarinet, bass clarinet and contrabassoon. Their neglect is handsomely remedied, with plentiful individual solo passages and numerous cadenzas, as well as exploitation as a sextet. The lengthiest portion of the work is an extended development section with recurrent ‘windows’ of slow music opening on to seascapes and landscapes in which the individual colours of the soloists’ timbres are most poetically used.
Carolisima looks like an ‘occasional’ piece (it was written for the birthday party of the wife of a friend) and, since the friend in question insisted on at least two tunes that guests could whistle and another they could dance to, it also looks like another of Maxwell Davies’s lighter works, a companion to An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise and A Spell for Green Corn. The whistleable tunes are gorgeous, especially the memorable slow air that begins the pieces, but the energetic hoe-down before the epilogue is both brief and part of an argument recognizably akin to those used in the concertos. There is a lot of solo work, too, so the work makes a very appropriate epilogue to the Strathclyde sequence as well as a sort of primer to it.
By now it hardly needs saying that the SCO play superbly for Maxwell Davies and that the recording is ideally clean, yet not without atmosphere.'