Maxwell Davies: Points and Dances from Taverner: Philharmonia/ Davies, et al

At the time of the premiere of his Eighth Symphony, the Antarctic, three years ago, Peter Maxwell Davies announced that he had no plans to write any more orchestral works in the years to come, but would concentrate instead on chamber music in general, and on string quartets in particular. Over the past four decades he has composed a prodigious number of orchestral pieces, his productivity steadily accelerating: as well as the eight symphonies, there have been numerous occasional pieces, and a list of concertos that easily stretches into double figures.

In many ways, the earliest of those works remain unsurpassed. The music that Davies was composing in the late 1960s was some of the most striking and original being produced anywhere in Europe at that time. Pieces such as the Mahlerian Second Taverner Fantasia, which uses material from his first opera, based on the life of the Tudor composer John Taverner; the huge and brooding Worldes Blis, which caused such an uproar when it was first performed at the Proms in 1969; and the "foxtrot for orchestra", St Thomas Wake - all are among the finest British orchestral achievements of the postwar era. They brought together a vast range of historical references: the organisational principles that Davies had inherited from the 1950s avant garde were fused with a fascination for medieval and renaissance techniques, a fondness for the extremes of expressionism and a savage use of musical parody and irony. The results were sometimes startling.

That was before Davies discovered the islands of Orkney, where he settled in 1971. Its bleak landscapes and seascapes, and its indigenous culture, wrought a major change in his musical language: he developed a new fondness for instrumental colour for its own sake, and a concentration on formal symmetries rather than expressive extremes. His music certainly gained a new beauty, often created by the use of pruned percussion, but it began to lose some of its sense of danger.

It was in that period that he began to write his First Symphony. Begun in 1973 and completed three years later, it seems in retrospect to have been the real turning point in Davies's development; the orchestral works that followed, including the subsequent symphonies, did not so much colonise new musical territory as rework and redefine existing principles.

Davies's First is a fine, imposing work. For me, at least, it remains the finest of his symphonies. Yet it is rarely performed nowadays, perhaps because until very recently Davies was producing new orchestral works at such a rate that there was no incentive for orchestras to explore his back catalogue. Simon Rattle, then just a bright young thing, conducted the first performance in 1976, and made this recording two years later for Decca; its appearance now on CD is long overdue.

The symphony contains reminders of the way in which Davies's music had evolved over the previous 20 years, as well as signs of the direction it was about to take. So while there may be echoes of the first movement of Boulez's Pli Selon Pli in the way in which its finale is articulated, the overriding model was Sibelius, a composer whose influence became increasingly important to Davies's music in the late 1970s.

The way in which Davies's second movement transforms itself from a Lento to a Scherzo inevitably recalls the first movement of Sibelius's Fifth, just as the irregular, thrusting chords with which Davies ends his finale recalls the same passage in the same Sibelius work. Yet these borrowings are never cheap imitation; they are much more a thorough, seamless assimilation of structural devices into a musical language that Davies had forged for himself and was beginning to use with huge assurance. The result is a significant and impressive piece of musical architecture, which has aged well over the last quarter-century.

The fill-up, drawn from Decca's extensive archive of British music of the 1960s and 1970s (all of which badly needs to be reissued), is worthwhile too, for the Points and Dances from Taverner is the only music currently available on disc from Maxwell Davies's first opera. In the stage work, these pieces, pastiches and parodies of 16th-century dance forms are played by an on-stage band as a backdrop to the political machinations that propel the action; they form a showcase of the techniques and devices that were the building blocks of Davies's music in the mid-1960s.

A very welcome issue, then - although Universal Classics does not get much credit for emblazoning the disc far more prominently with the name of the ubiquitous Rattle (who is now contracted to their rival EMI) than that of Davies.