Published: 10 September 2012
Category: Artists

The London premiere of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Ninth Symphony at the BBC Proms with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vassily Petrenko led to ciritcal praise for the work:

“This brilliantly crafted work — Haydn-esque in duration, Mahlerian in scope — is far from the kind of ceremonial work one might expect from the master of the Queen’s music. Indeed, its attitude to militarism and war is not so far from Shostakovich’s in his Seventh and 10th. A memorable concert in a terrific week for British musicians at the Proms.“
Sunday Times, September 2012

“This new symphony is very much fired, too, by its own internal conflicts. Not only do its dark timpani rolls, its sounds and alarums, and its anarchic interpolations from brass sextet speak of the chaos of war, they also obliquely summon up spectres of royal pomp and circumstance... Does it celebrate, mourn or warn? Like the Shostakovich that followed it, it does all three simultaneously. And it is those collisions and ambivalences that give the work its power. The symphony is typical Maxwell Davies: the old anarchist peeping over the parapet of the status quo and finding cunning compositional means with which to hold together menace and mischief. The work’s main material is artfully transformed by interval and rhythmic bending. Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic played the piece with meticulous commitment and assurance.”
The Times, September 2012

“Played without a break, the symphony unfolds darkly, before a brass sextet, seated above and to one side of the orchestra, introduces a succession of jaunty flourishes. These unleash a series of disintegrations and crises from which the remainder of the work seeks a fragile closure... indisputably one of Maxwell Davies’ most engaged orchestral works and it may well claim a lasting place in the repertoire.”
The Guardian, September 2012

“Undertones of war pervaded the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s return to the Proms [with] the London premiere of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Symphony No.9. A single movement protest against the futility of Britain’s involvement in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Davies’s work builds slowly in unsettling waves of textured rhythm punctuated by blasts of distorted fanfare from a brass sextet positioned at arm’s length from the orchestra. The overall effect was disconcerting but intentionally so, as chief conductor Vasily Petrenko’s fastidious control ensured the piece remained coherent all the way to its brittle closure. Liverpool Daily Post, September 2012

Maxwell Davies's Symphony No.9 was commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the Helsinki Philharmonic and is published by Chester Music. Click here for more details.

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