CD: Maxwell Davies: O Magnum Mysterium; Antechrist etc: Redgrave/ Davies/ Atherton/ Groves, et al

This immensely valuable and long-overdue collection, released to coincide with Peter Maxwell Davies's 70th birthday next month, brings on to CD for the first time a number of important recordings released on the Decca and Argo labels more than a quarter of a century ago. It fills some important gaps, and includes some of Davies's most important achievements from the 1960s and early 70s, a period when he was unquestionably the most exciting young composer in Britain. The pieces are arranged chronologically; the earliest here is the choral piece O Magnum Mysterium, which Davies composed for the boys of Cirencester grammar school when he was teaching there in 1960, though on this recording it lacks the huge organ fantasia with which it originally ended, and the latest is the Hymn to Saint Magnus, one of the greatest of his early Orkney-inspired pieces, written for the Fires of London in 1972.

That's just a 13-year span, but the style changes over that period were hugely significant. The pivotal work here is the Second Taverner Fantasia, a 40-minute span of orchestral music which grew out of Davies's work on his first opera, Taverner, and which, in retrospect, was an anticipation of the later symphonic works. First performed in 1965, it signalled the end of Davies's first period as a composer, and prepared the way for his expressionist works, often with a theatrical element, of the later 1960s. There are two of those pieces, here, one is the exquisite little overture Antechrist, written for the newly formed Pierrot Players in 1967 and the Missa super L'Homme Armé from the following year, which begins as a completion of an anonymous 15th-century mass, but which travels farther and farther from the original, introducing texts from St Luke's gospel (read by Vanessa Redgrave on this recording), a wind-up gramophone and a whole parade of musical parodies and pastiches.

Davies settled in Orkney in 1971, established a friendship with the local writer George Mackay Brown and set his poetry first in the wonderfully supple little cantata From Stone to Thorn, a calendar of the seasons depicted in luminous verbal and musical imagery. Yet the Hymn to St Magnus is a far larger work, a one-movement chamber symphony with a soprano obbligato that shows how far colouristically and musically Davies's had travelled in just a few years. It's still one of his greatest achievements, and wonderful to hear once again on disc; the transfers of all these pieces are first-rate.