| scoring: |
1 flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, strings (7.6.5.4.3) |
| world premiere: |
23 July 2008, Stiftskirche, Ossiach, Austria (Carinthische Sommer Festspiele)
Camerata Salzburg, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies conductor |
| commissioner: |
Carinthischer Sommer and Camerata Salzburg |
| press quotes: |
 …an orchestral meditation, which painted internalized sketches and was woven into expressive poems by the brass section… Both pieces proved the high compositional quality of Davies’ work, and had their baptism at the hands of the Camerata Salzburg under Davies’ own inspired conducting.
Wiener Zeitung
July 2008
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| composer’s note: |
In his poem ‘Thorfinn’, George Mackay Brown describes his sea-death as a turn of a “salt key in his last door of light”: I imagine a slow spinning through “Long green currents of water,/ Sunk to the root of seaweed and/ In cove of shells settled”.
My home, on one of the most northerly Orkney Islands (off the north coast of Scotland), is right on the shore, where I walk the dog for miles, in total isolation each morning and evening. Just close by the house are two small uninhabited islands, with the scattered remains of a tiny medieval church – here are reputed to rest the bodies of hundreds of sailors snared on the rocks through the ages – indeed, there are still many traces of boat wreckage from the last two centuries.
We know that with climate change, the house will sooner or later be drowned – most of the large, flat island is due to disappear.
The present work is a meditation on such individual and communal vulnerability, though it is by no means a completely negative one: we know we must all enter that last door of light: and the way to it is, intermittently, also full of light.
The melody at the start of the work could almost be an Island folk melody – I composed it in the late ‘seventies and never used it. It is subject to constant transformation, reaching apotheosis at the end: the plainsong fragment ‘Lumen Congitionis’ is subjected to a seven-by-seven magic square metamorphosis, with progressive gradual superposition of long isorhythmic units.
© Sir Peter Maxwell Davies |