London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano – Maxwell Davies Symphony No 10 (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 41:56 minutes | 907 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live
The Symphony No 10 was comissioned and premiered by the LSO in February 2014 to mark the eightieth birthday of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Newly-commissioned works are a step into the unknown for composer and commissioner alike. Sometimes remarkable works are born, and sometimes not. But no-one could possibly have guessed in what circumstances the Symphony No 10 would come to be written.
The work’s relationship with mortality is a curious one, completed as it was against the severe odds of the composer’s life-threatening illness during 2013. The sheer determination of Maxwell Davies to finish the symphony, after an unexpected diagnosis and during gruelling treatment, is extraordinary in itself. By a strange coincidence, the composer had already chosen to write a work bound up with the life and death of an artist.
The inspiration for the Symphony No 10 is the seventeenth century Italian architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667), whose architecture has fascinated Maxwell Davies since his own studies in Italy in the late fifties. The piece explores the concept of sound as architecture, not unlike Borromini’s own preoccupation with ‘form, volume and light’. Its divine spark, however, is Borromini’s ‘last testament’, an extraordinary text written as the architect met his slow end following a suicide attempt. After a lifetime of public criticism, the baroque genius takes his own life, committing his extraordinary reflections to paper in the two days it takes him to die. The text is used in the closing movement of the symphony, which is scored for orchestra, baritone and chorus.
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