Peter Maxwell Davies's Second Taverner Fantasy is the big one: three-quarters-of-an-hour long, much feared by orchestras and their managements, and for that reason seldom performed. Together with the first and much shorter fantasy, and with a selection of vocal music by the sixteenth-century composer who inspired both these works, it formed a substantial and enthralling programme at Glasgow Cathedral last night.
Hearing the pieces in context with each other - indeed resonating against each other - was greatly helpful, of course, and just what Davies would have desired. They showed the short, mostly reflective, first fantasy to be the emotional obverse of the fierce, violent opening portion of the second. In the cathedral's rich yet clear acoustics, the latter work, with Martyn Brabbins as conductor, made a turbulent, searing effect, sometimes seething like a cauldron, sometimes releasing what sounded like dark obscenities from the depths of the orchestra, sometimes briefly damped down only to boil over again, the important violin lines never obscured by what was going on around and beneath them.
As a performance it was initially a relentless feat of intensity, but maintaining the tension of the much slower, quieter second half of the work must have been just as hard. Here Brabbins never let the tone go slack, and built the closing section into something like an eloquent Davies-style adagietto for strings. To those who say the 1960s were a bad period for music, here was a refutation. Though the Dunedin Consort's vocal contributions were inevitably more fragmented, they made their own contribution to the success of the evening.
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