Peter Maxwell Davies

condition (record/cover): NM / EX-
Gatefold sleeve. Insert included.

The defining document of Peter Maxwell Davies's engagement with the Tudor composer John Taverner - and a record whose importance in the history of British new music extends well beyond its contents. Davies had spent much of the 1960s working on his opera Taverner (1962-70), a work that used the historical composer's life and music as the vehicle for a meditation on artistic compromise, spiritual crisis, and the corrupting force of worldly power - themes that resonated with Davies's own position as a radical outsider within British musical culture. The orchestral Points and Dances from Taverner and the Second Fantasia on John Taverner's 'In Nomine' distill this engagement into concentrated concert works, the medieval source material subjected to the kind of violent transformation - fragmentation, collage, distortion - that had become the signature of Davies's compositional language.

The connection to the In Nomine tradition runs deep: from Taverner's original cantus-firmus elaboration, through the Elizabethan viol consort pieces it spawned, to Davies's twentieth-century reimagining - a chain of historical transformation that gives the work its temporal vertigo, its sense of the past erupting into the present with undiminished force. Conducted by Colin Davis with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Argo, ZRG 712.