Peter Maxwell Davies

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

This is the one. Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) - Peter Maxwell Davies's music theater masterwork for male voice and ensemble - remains, more than fifty years after its premiere, one of the most viscerally powerful works in the post-war repertoire, and this original Unicorn recording with Roy Hart as King George III and the Fires of London under Davies's own direction is the document that confirmed it as such. Hart's voice - trained in the extended vocal techniques he had developed with Alfred Wolfsohn and at his Roy Hart Theatre - is capable of a range of more than eight octaves and a quality of screaming, whispering, and singing simultaneously that no conventional operatic training produces, and Davies wrote for it with a matching extremism.

The eight songs, based on texts by Randolph Stow, trace the mad king's attempts to make the caged birds sing and his eventual attack on the performers - the ensemble members placed in large birdcages on the stage, the king moving among them in his derangement, until in the final song the musical language itself begins to fragment and dissolve. A work that treats the breakdown of a mind as the occasion for a breakdown of musical convention, and that makes both feel genuinely catastrophic. Unicorn, UNS 261.