Peter Maxwell Davies, Richard Wernick

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

A pairing of two composers whose work occupied markedly different territories of the American and British new music landscape in the early 1970s - brought together on Nonesuch's consistently thoughtful catalogue of contemporary music. Peter Maxwell Davies's Dark Angels (1974), for soprano and guitar, draws on texts by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown - whose Orcadian world had become, by this point, the primary mythological substrate of Davies's imagination. A work of remarkable intimacy and compression: the soprano Mary Thomas and guitarist Julian Bream inhabiting a vocal and harmonic world that sits between medieval incantation and a modernist intensity of interval and gesture that belongs entirely to Davies's mature language.

Richard Wernick's Songs of Remembrance brings the American experience of the same period - a vocal and chamber music of tightly wrought expressive force, the serial inheritance channeled through a sensibility less interested in system than in the immediate urgency of the musical material. The Nonesuch pairing frames both works as documents of their shared historical moment: the years when the British and American avant-gardes were reexamining what the inheritance of Darmstadt could mean when placed in the service of direct expressive communication. Nonesuch, H-71342.