Naxos Quartets Nos. 1 and 2

Album review

The release of Peter Maxwell Davies' Naxos Quartets Nos. 1 and 2 is a truly auspicious occasion. Dubbed Master of the Queen's Music and having reached the personal milestone of age 70, Maxwell Davies is experiencing an enthusiastic resurgence of interest in his work that even he could not have imagined just five years prior. This was when the Collins Classics label folded, and with it went most of the recordings of Maxwell Davies' music into the ether. In this instance the trailblazing Naxos label has revived a time-honored tradition that has long fallen out of practice due to the decline of the "prestige factor" once accorded to classical recordings by major record companies -- the idea of a record company commissioning a work from a composer specifically for the purposes of a recording.
Ultimately the Naxos Quartets will swell to ten in number, and if anyone can pull such an ambitious project off it is the hard-working and prolific Maxwell Davies. The first two quartets here are performed to perfection by the Maggini Quartet. The disc has wry, sometimes funny, and in some cases rather technical liner notes by the composer. Clearly Maxwell Davies is utilizing this commission to stretch out and show his stuff, but these quartets are anything but cold and systematic. While generally expressionistic in character, the first two Naxos Quartets have long passages of lyricism and warmth. The long, slow movement that concludes the Naxos Quartet No. 2 is one of Maxwell Davies' most inspired creations, and one can easily imagine this work catching on and perhaps becoming the first quartet written in this century to gain status as a repertory item in chamber concerts.
Maxwell Davies' Naxos Quartets are not for everyone -- they are conceived very naturally in a tough and contemporary idiom. Yet they are not so in the extreme, and anyone who enjoys the Bartók String Quartets should be able to get a grip on this music. Overall, this is a splendid undertaking -- congratulations to Naxos, the Maggini Quartet, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies!

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