Nicholas Maw

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (small sticker on back)

The work that announced Nicholas Maw's arrival at a fully mature and entirely individual compositional voice - and, on the original Argo pressing, a record of some rarity. Life Studies (1972-73), for fifteen solo strings, grew from Maw's sustained engagement with the rich harmonic language of late Romanticism, which he had never abandoned even during the years when the dominant avant-garde made such engagement professionally costly. He described the work as an attempt to reconnect with the tradition of the string serenade - Brahms, Elgar, the lyrical central European inheritance - while bringing to that tradition a contemporary harmonic seriousness that reactivated rather than merely revived it.

The result is a work of extraordinary sensuous richness: the fifteen string parts weaving a harmonic and melodic texture of sustained, glowing intensity, the architecture episodic but coherent, the whole giving the impression of a composer who has simply decided to write the most beautiful music he is capable of and has the technical means to succeed. In the context of 1973 British new music, the gesture was provocative in its refusal of difficulty as a marker of seriousness. The passage of time has confirmed its distinction. Argo, ZRG 899.