Customer Reviews

Peter Maxwell Davies: Naxos Quartets 1 & 2

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Gee, maybe I listen to too much Twentieth Century/Twenty-first Century music because I didn't think these were too difficult as some other reviews have suggested. With this type of music you can't write it off as "just noise" after one hearing because unless you are some sort of aural genius you definitely wont "get it" the first time around. After multiple hearings though, they start to sound a lot more approachable. One can definitely hear themes and melodies and even some tonal harmonies in these works. So as far as difficulty and approachability goes, I would say these quartets are more difficult than Bartok's quartets, but less difficult than Elliot Carter's.

Actually, one of the things I love about music is when I don't get a piece right away. Then for me the fun of listening is trying to "solve the puzzle" of the piece, so to speak. And here we have not 1, 2 or 3 but 10! new string quartets to pull apart, put together and try and decode. That's exactly the thing that gets my blood boiling with excitement the most! Definitely get these quartets.

Si vous ne connaissez pas Peter M. Davies, ses quatuors
sonnent un peu comme Schnittke ou Berg. L'interprétation
du maggini Quartet est franche,«taillée au couteau»
À essayer si vous aimez le genre... R.R

Try it! this album sound very good. The maggini quartet has
a sound like "a clean cut sound" Peter M. Davies remind me
something between Bartok, Berg, Schnittke or something like that.
A good bargain from Naxos at low price.

Well, we all kowtow before this kind of music but I, for one, have had enough. Its not so very hard to write music like this. But lacking any real continuity or melodic identification, it will not have much appeal to most music lovers. The system of harmony which has served Western culture for centuries is based on natural phenomena. Just disregarding it may be very "in" (as it has been increasingly since Schoenberg's bad ideas) but it has yet to produce anything that replaces the tonal music that is so satisfying and uplifting to hear. Stuff like this only sends us back to the old masters for some real artistic nourishment. Why is Maxwell-Davies considered a "Universally acknowledged as one of the foremost composers of our time?" I am unaware that he has put many pieces into the repertory. Certainly not like Prokofiev or Strauss to name just two from the past several decades. Even a difficult creator like Hindemith has put lots of music into concert life.

I give this release one star because I really admire the Maggini Quartet and have many, many of their excellent recordings on Naxos.