Nicholas Maw's ‘One Man Show’

Extract

After the ‘Essay for Organ’, in which Maw found a satisfactory style from which he could build outwards to encompass serial and free atonal elements, with conjunct as well as fragmentary writing, he produced two works hinting at two different veins that might be tapped in his subsequent music. Of these the ‘Chamber Music’ combined an atonal harmony comparable with that of middle period Schoenberg, with his own cast of melody (sometimes a little Brittenish) in music that moved forward to a more or less traditional pulse; the vision presented here was serious but genial, and included a vein of affectionate parody. In ‘Scenes and Arias’ however we find a very different world in which a driving sexual energy coexists with dark expressionist poetry. The idiom in this work is of a richness in atonal harmony and texture that precludes a traditional forward movement, and static and dynamic passages combine to form a motion of considerable subtlety.