Peter Maxwell Davies, Roberto Gerhard

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (ring wear on bottom back)

Two generations, two works of exceptional intensity, and a pairing that illuminates the trajectory of British musical modernism from the immediate post-war moment to its most dramatically confrontational expressions. Roberto Gerhard's Collages (1960), for tape and orchestra, stands among his most concentrated achievements: a work that treats the boundary between electronic and acoustic sound not as a problem to be managed but as a compositional principle, the tape interventions tearing at the orchestral fabric with a violence that the purely acoustic forces cannot contain. Gerhard's position as a Catalan exile - a student of Schoenberg who had found himself in Cambridge, working in productive isolation from both the continental avant-garde and the British mainstream - gave his music a particular intensity of pressure.

Peter Maxwell Davies's Revelation and Fall (1966), for soprano and sixteen instruments after Georg Trakl, pursues a related confrontation by entirely different means: the soprano's screaming, the ensemble's splintered references to historical material, the text's hallucinatory violence, combining into a work that could only have been written in the mid-1960s and that still carries the original shock of that moment. Available here on the original Angel pressing (S-36558) and on an Italian EMI pressing (C063-00390). Angel / EMI Italiana.