Knowra Peter Maxwell Davies Peter Maxwell Davies Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016) was an English composer and conductor whose works include the opera The Lighthouse and the orchestral cycle Symphonies of London.
The Lighthouse : A chamber opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, set in an isolated Scottish lighthouse and shaped by a mysterious disappearance. This opera brings together his theatrical writing, Scottish settings, and taste for unsettling musical drama.
St Magnus International Festival : An annual arts festival founded in Orkney in 1977, presenting music, theatre, and other arts. Davies co-founded the festival and used it to build a musical life in Orkney.
Elisabeth Lutyens : An English composer known for adopting twelve-tone serial techniques in British music. Her example helped establish a British modernist context for Davies’s early development.
The Yellow Cake Revue : A satirical music-theatre work by Peter Maxwell Davies criticizing uranium mining in Orkney. It demonstrates how local environmental conflict entered his theatrical and political music.
Benjamin Britten : An English composer whose operas and vocal works helped shape twentieth-century British music. Britten’s accessible dramatic idiom offers a contrast with Davies’s more abrasive modernist theatre.
Symphonies of London : A cycle of ten symphonies by Peter Maxwell Davies, written for the London Symphony Orchestra between 1985 and 2005. The cycle shows his large-scale orchestral writing across two decades.
Orkney : An archipelago off the northeastern coast of Scotland, with a distinctive Norse and Scottish history. Davies settled in Orkney, where its landscape and history informed his later work.
Alexander Goehr : An English composer and conductor associated with postwar modernism and the Manchester School. Goehr was Davies’s fellow student at the Royal Manchester College of Music.
Worldes Blis : A 1969 orchestral work by Peter Maxwell Davies, built from medieval source material and modernist techniques. It is a concentrated example of his method of reworking medieval music.
Michael Tippett : An English composer known for expansive choral and operatic works, including The Midsummer Marriage. Tippett’s lyrical, humanist modernism provides a different model from Davies’s angular language.
Show all 26