About the Performance
Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is a composer long resident in Scotland, with a huge affection for his adopted country. His rousing depiction of a wedding on the Orkney islands is his most famous work. His 5th Symphony was influenced by plainchant and written at a time when he had been studying the music of Sibelius.
Written to celebrate the British Orchestra, James MacMillian's Britannia is an affectionate orchestral fantasy with a Celtic feel which incorporates martial marches and imperial themes, an Irish reel and a Cockney drinking song.
The elegiac passages in The Confession of Isobel Gowdie are interrupted by extreme and violent music reflecting Isobel's suffering and representing the murdered innocents of witch hunts.
'the work craves absolution and offers Isobel Gowdie {tried for witchcraft in 1662} the mercy and humanity that was denied her in the last days of her life...I have tried to capture the soul of Scotland in music' James MacMillan