Symphony No. 10

In his 80th year, Peter Maxwell Davies returns in music to Rome, where he studied with Goffredo Petrassi in the late 1950’s. Full of darkly glowing sonorities (recalling the earlier Roma, Amor of 1998) and often in a language of startling harmonic directness, the Symphony sets Leopardi’s sonnet A se stesso, Borromini’s last testament and an anonymous sonnet which attacks Borromini’s work for its ‘eccentricity’ and ‘lack of coherence’. Davies has composed a deeply moving meditation on the nature of creativity, the artist’s relationship with the past and, ultimately, mortality. Chris Austin