BBC Proms Masterworks: Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle BBC Proms

Tonight, in our last programme of Masterworks from the Proms,

we celebrate the seismic achievements

of two of the greatest composers alive -

Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies -

both 80 this year,

and both Knights of the Realm.

But don't let those establishment credentials fool you,

these two and their music

are still as incendiary and provocative as ever.

So we've put together a selection of their music

from this year's Prom season,

as well as a few wee gems from the BBC archive.

Happy birthday, Harry and Max.

APPLAUSE

Welcome, everyone.

Tonight we're celebrating the 80th birthday

of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies,

Master of the Queen's Music for a decade,

and a composer whose music has thrilled, delighted

and shocked audiences at the Royal Albert Hall

for the past half-century and he's also, I'm delighted to say,

with us this evening on his actual 80th birthday.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome onstage, Max.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Now, Max, look, this is a pretty good way

to, you know, celebrate your 80th birthday,

what with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra behind you.

You're also wearing an absolutely resplendent waistcoat,

which I should say is the first cut ever of a new tartan

made for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

and personalised for you, Max.

I mean, I suppose that symbolises

the strength of your relationship with this orchestra.

How much does your story with these musicians mean to you?

The orchestra really has meant an enormous amount to me.

Let's face it, a long time ago now in the '80s,

they asked me to be composer/conductor in residence.

Well, I was terrified cos I'd never conducted orchestras,

but they put up with me

and taught me, really, if I ever could conduct, how to conduct,

and they were such wonderful, helpful musicians

and the chance to write ten Strathclyde Concertos

for the members of the orchestra...

Well, as a composer, you're going to be delighted

to be asked to write one concerto, never mind ten!

We're going to hear the fourth, the second piece tonight.

The first piece also was written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra - Ebb Of Winter.

Let's welcome onstage

to conduct the Proms and London premiere performance

of Peter Maxwell Davies' Ebb Of Winter, Ben Gernon.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

Peter Maxwell Davies' Ebb Of Winter, performed by the musicians

for whom it was written, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Max, having the privilege of hearing that music with you here,

it sounds out great darkness in the sort of the broken corrals

at the middle of the piece,

but at the end there seems to be an image of a kind of rebirth,

that surging string melody,

and above all the brass rising at the end.

What do you feel as you're hearing that?

Do you feel a kind of rebirth at the end of that piece?

That music that I was writing, it knew something that I didn't,

and I found myself, shortly after writing it,

in hospital with leukaemia, being told I had,

if I didn't go into hospital, a maximum of six weeks to live.

And here I am, so I'm fine.

But I feel that it ends optimistically. There's darkness

in the middle, but the end, something happens which turns it

and it becomes something which I hoped it would be

all the way through when I started to write it, but it changed,

and I think the end of it, it had to end like that, didn't it?

Absolutely. Max, the next piece we're going to hear then,

you could've chosen, as you said, from ten Strathclyde Concertos,

all of them written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the 1980s

and 1990s. You've chosen No.4 for clarinet and Chamber Orchestra.

Why this one?

I could've chosen any of them.

I'm very, very fond of them all, and they're all like your children,

and you can't really favour one above the other, can you?

It's a piece which is meditative.

It's got huge virtuosity,

and it's one of those pieces which is in search of something.

And it's changing contour all the time,

and finishes in the key of F sharp with this melody floating

from the clarinet over the orchestra.

It's a long and quite torturous journey, if you like, in places.

But for me, when I was writing it, it was one which was full of...

I can only describe it as the sheer wonder of taking a very long

free walk through the seascape and the landscape,

that I just see all the time out of my window or if I open the door

in Orkney. The thing that I was really aiming for

was the transcendence that I felt right at the end of it.

Max, thank you.

So, to perform this half-hour long meditative spiritual journey

for clarinet in orchestra,

please welcome on stage at the Royal Albert Hall

the soloist Dimitri "Dimka" Ashkenazy

and the conductor Ben Gernon.

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

So here with me to explore and celebrate the music

of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir Harrison Birtwistle

is Gillian Moore, the Head of Classical Music

at London Southbank Centre.

Gillian, where would the world of new music,

the world of the whole of music be without Harry and Max?

Well, I guess the two of them have defined what we mean

by modern music in Britain for the last 50 years or so.

They were both born in the same year, in 1934,

which is the year, as it happens,

that three greats of English music died -

Holst, Elgar and Delius.

Vaughn Williams was still very much alive,

the eminence grise.

I guess when they were at school together, at college together

at Manchester in the 1950s, they rejected all that,

what Elizabeth Lutyens called the "cowpat school of music,"

the English pastoral thing.

They saw that version of modern music,

which had been invented at the start of the century by these guys,

as very old-fashioned.

They were looking, instead, to Europe.

They were interested in Schoenberg,

in what was happening with people like Stockhausen

in the post-war avant-garde.

I guess what they did in those days

was bring the cool air of European modernism

into British music.

Since then, they've just grown in stature.

They've had their periods of being shocking and outrageous,

and I guess they're now major, quite establishment figures.

But despite that establishment-ness,

or the establishment status that they now both have,

the music they're writing now,

the music they've always written is still challenging, isn't it?

It needs to be challenging, doesn't it?

Well, I think there's nothing wrong with challenging in music,

but I would say that each of them is different

in terms of the way that their music is challenging or not.

Birtwistle I tend to listen to...

in a much more simple, I guess, elemental way,

cos his music, actually, is about the simple building blocks of music.

It's about pulse, it's about line,

it's about machines and things that repeat or don't repeat.

I guess if you listen to Birtwistle's music in that way,

then that really does make it actually, I think,

really quite simple to listen to.

We're going to see now Harry himself

talking about his relationship with his listeners.

In a way, what he expects from his listeners,

in a way, what he doesn't expect from them either.

Here's Harrison Birtwistle.

I didn't sort of see myself in any light at all,

or with any cause or whatever.

I think in this day and age, where we live in a disposable world,

which we don't actually listen to music anymore,

apart from what we're familiar with,

and the sort of backdrop of polluted music

through radio stations.

Maybe there is a case for something that's slightly difficult...

or needs a bit of enquiry, or reassesses,

or has a bit of confrontation about it.

Nothing wrong in that, but I'm not self-consciously doing it.

There are many, many things I could have told you

exactly why one thing happens next.

But I've forgotten and nobody will ever know.

I don't want you to know, yeah?

I just want you to listen to it and understand it for what it is

and either you find that interesting or you don't.

Gillian, an appeal then from Harry himself to take his music

simply on its own terms.

If he doesn't know where all the notes come from,

I guess we can't as listeners either.

I guess a lot of his music is like a mysterious ritual.

I often think with his pieces that they start

kind of in the middle of things.

It's as if it has already been going on, perhaps for ever,

perhaps since the beginning of time.

And when you actually sit down in the concert or

put your headphones on, you just happen to be coming in

at a certain point in it and then similarly it ends in that way.

So much of his music also has a strange theatricality to it

and the musicians are placed in a certain way in the hall,

or they move around the platform sometimes.

I think this mystery is at the heart of it.

We are going to hear two pieces of Harry's now,

starting with a piece that's really a distillation of everything

you've been saying about his music and he has, too, a piece called

Sonance Severance that he wrote in 2000 for the Cleveland Orchestra.

It had a fantastic performance earlier in the Proms season from the

National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Ed Gardner.

And I think, really, as you were saying, the best way to

approach this is, in a way, as if you've never heard music before.

Sonance Severance.

A miniature epic or an epic miniature,

Harrison Birtwistle's Sonance Severance.

Gillian, you've mentioned they are different

but there are similarities between their stories -

Harrison Birtwistle's and Peter Maxwell Davies's.

Manchester, they are growing up there of course, but also

they moved to remote parts of Scotland at roughly the same time.

There are these similarities, aren't there?

And they are both very interested in the landscape.

Maxwell Davies had written

so much music about the landscape of Orkney where he went to live.

And Birtwistle, I think one of the interesting things about him now

is where he has chosen to live, which is down

in the southwest of England, in the middle of all these

mysterious monuments, near Silbury Hill...

Which he has written about, in a piece called Silbury Air.

A piece called Silbury Air.

Stonehenge, all these monuments which are there

but we don't actually know what they were ever for.

And that's something akin to his music but I think I still

would hold to the idea that they are very different.

The music critic Meirion Bowen once said about them,

quoting Isaiah Berlin, that they were like a fox and a hedgehog.

Isaiah Berlin talked about this idea that the fox knows many things

and the hedgehog knows one big thing. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

might be the fox because his music is so clever,

so varied. It's constantly looking in all sorts of directions.

It's very aware of what it's doing.

Whereas, Birtwistle's music is this big mystery.

It simultaneously makes me feel that it has existed

since the beginning of time and yet it's utterly new and utterly fresh.

Let's hear now Harry himself talking about his relationship

with landscape, like a hedgehog or not. Let's discover.

I have a preoccupation with landscape

and I have tended to develop my musical language

out of a rather sort of painterly attitude to things.

There is no actual separation to me between the things that I make

and the things that I see.

Writing music is like driving a car at night in which you can only see

as far as the headlights, you know,

and you get an idea of the landscape

and it accumulates in your head.

We associate English music with the mystical landscape,

the sort of Vaughan Williams thing.

I saw nature as a terrifying place. It wasn't a sort of pastoral place.

It's hell on earth, living there, to be a worm or a bird.

It's all the survival of the fittest, isn't it?

The question is where this comes from,

when he sits down at his manuscript paper.

Here's Harry talking about how he sees

or attempts to describe his compositional process.

For many years, I always began a piece of music on the note E,

not for any other reason that it seemed to be as good

a place as anywhere else

and it was a decision that I didn't have to make.

And how you do make the first decision of doing anything?

I mean, I can't be so pretentious as saying, "I'm going to push music

"where it's never been." I mean, you can't do that.

You can only identify that after the fact.

You can't self-consciously express yourself.

You express yourself in spite of yourself.

You have ideas and then you find ways of getting it down on the page.

Somebody once asked me why I wrote music and I said

because I had a music in my head that doesn't exist.

Gillian, these are wonderful insights that Harry

is giving us into his music.

Everything he's saying has a sort of laser-like illumination.

This idea that Harry somehow doesn't like using words much.

In fact, he's brilliant with them.

Yes, "I had a music in my head that didn't exist."

That is just the ultimate thing for a composer to say.

It's such an exciting idea.

He has this reputation of being rather monosyllabic,

the hedgehog thing again.

But, in fact, he knows exactly what he's doing

and he knows exactly how to express his music.

He's very interested in all art forms.

He's very interested in literature, of course,

and poetry and Greek drama, in painting and visual art.

He's phenomenally knowledgeable about visual art.

Something that I find really interesting is

if you visit him at home, you realise what a general all-round...

He just is a creator in all spheres of life.

The next piece we are going to hear is Night's Black Bird,

a 40-minute orchestral work which had another wonderful

performance this season at the Proms, Juanjo Mena

conducting the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

A 14-minute evocation of melancholy in some way.

What else from that whole world of creativity is coming together

in this music we are going to hear, Night's Black Bird?

Well, melancholy, yes, because it's related to a song

by John Dowland, the Elizabethan composer, who Harry is extremely

fond of and Dowland made a kind of cult out of the idea of melancholy.

Harry describes it as being like humour of the night,

an inspired mental condition.

And you hear this song, In Darkness Let Me Dwell,

you hear just the first three notes...

Just three notes rising and then falling.

And that sort of pervades the piece.

But also there are so many other aspects of his music there.

There's the idea of a thing I was talking about,

the sort of machine,

not like a tick-tock machine like clockwork like you hear

in some of his other music,

but it's rather lumbering, something grinding into action

and then repeating and then changing as it repeats.

So, listen out for that.

Also listen out for those wonderful Birtwistle wind melodies

that sort of emerge out of nowhere and go back again,

these constantly changing shapes.

And then, as the piece gets going, you have this nocturnal atmosphere,

Night's Black Bird, you hear the blackbird,

you hear in the piccolo some birdsong but again you've got

this sense of a mysterious ritual going on and it starts as if

it's always been going on and it ends with this big,

long trumpet note, and you think, well,

it could have ended anywhere but it happened to end here.

That's where we come out of it

but the piece is probably going on for ever.

MUSIC ENDS

APPLAUSE

Harrison Birtwistle's Night's Black Bird.

Juanjo Mena conducting the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

We're taking a sharp night's move away from melancholy

for the last music we're going to hear tonight.

Returning to Peter Maxwell Davies' Birthday Prom,

we're going to hear An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise.

Let's go back to the Royal Albert Hall.

Peter Maxwell Davies with his own thoughts about this music.

It was my dear friends, Jack and Dorothy Rendell, on Hoy.

And, er, they got married and it was an occasion for great celebration,

and, er, you hear the guests arrive and being politely greeted

with a glass of whisky, but, er, as the dancing starts

and proceeds, it becomes a little bit more jolly and inebriated.

And, er, there's one section

where I, um, did something which happened there,

it happened that the players were so absolutely, um,

drunk on the whisky that they could hardly play,

but they rallied and came round and, er, I walked home across the island

and I decided that the wonderful sunrise that I saw

was going to be celebrated in a rather special way.

And so, at the end of the work, there is a sunrise,

but if you don't know the piece,

I think you'll be quite surprised by it.

Um, that's the perfect upbeat. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome

onstage Ben Gernon to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

and Peter Maxwell Davies' An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise.

APPLAUSE

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

ORCHESTRA STARTS PLAYING "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU"

LAUGHTER

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Masterworks.

What have we learned over the last seven weeks,

from Bach to Birtwhistle, from Mozart to Maxwell Davies?

Well, maybe this -

that we can't take any of these pieces for granted,

that they live and breathe and change in live performance

and, above all, in these performances at the Proms.

You know, this music has been made anew

in that crucible of classical music that is the Royal Albert Hall

and the concerts will go on resonating

in everyone's imagination who heard them,

including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's

unforgettable Maxwell Davies tonight.

Because that's where these masterworks are truly alive -

in your ears, in your minds and in your hearts.