01. An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (1985)~ [12'12]
02. Kinloche, his Fantassie (1976) [4'07]
03. - 09. Seven Songs Home (1981)^ [11'29]
10. Yesnaby Ground (1980)* [2'19]
11. Dances from 'The Two Fiddlers' (1978) [7'08]
12. Jimmack the Postie (1985) [9'06]
13. Farewell to Stromness (1980)* [4'50]
14. Lullabye for Lucy^ (1981) [5'04]
15. - 21. Renaissance Scottish Dances (1973)^ [9'20]
Peter Maxwell Davies- piano*; The Choir of St Mary's Music School^; George McIlwham- highland bagpipes~, Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Peter Maxwell Davies
Unicorn-Kanchana DKPCD9070 [recorded February 1988; CD released 2008]
[digital download; flacs, cover, booklet and inlay scans]
Recording venue: Queen's Hall, Edinburgh
Recording engineer: Antony Howell; Producer: Veronica Slater
I guess this collection could have easily been titled "Max's Greatest Hits" by less scrupulous recording company executives. But there is no disputing that it includes many of Peter Maxwell Davies' easier going and most popular works - An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, Farewell to Stromness and Lullabye for Lucy for instance. Indeed this could have easily been titled "A Celebration of Orkney" - the Scottish island group that was his home since emigrating from England in the early 1970s. He founded the St. Magnus International Arts Festival there in 1977.
Having the composer conducting, and playing the two solo piano works, guarantees the high quality of the music making here. Peter Maxwell Davies celebrates life - happy, tragic and fatalistic - frequently with an Orkney background.
Although written for a Hungarian childrens choir, Seven Songs Home. sets texts by the composer describing a child's walk home from school in Orkney with a few diversions along the way. Written for John Williams and the Boston Pops, the rumbustious and joyful An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise depicts an inebriated wedding party on the Orcadian island of Hoy, ending at dawn with the sound of highland bagpipes from across the water in Caithness. Jimmack the Postieis a portrait of Davies' local postman making his way around his windswept island. Lullabye for Lucy is a setting of George Mackay Brown's poem celebrating a baby born in a depopulated Hoy valley, the first for 32 years. And the two solo piano pieces - Yesnaby Ground and Farewell to Stromness - are interludes from the Yellow Cake Review, written in protest at prospective open-pit uranium mining in Orkney.