CD: Maxwell Davies: Seven Skies of Winter; Step By Circle, etc: Nash Ensemble et al

On Sunday the South Bank Centre in London launches its Peter Maxwell Davies festival, a slightly belated celebration of the composer's 70th birthday last September. That festival will include a concert by the Maggini Quartet in which they will introduce the Naxos Quartet No 6, so passing the halfway point in fulfilling Davies's commission from the record company for a set of 10 string quartets. The label is certainly fulfilling its side of the bargain; a disc of Nos 1 and 2 appeared last autumn, and now come the Third and Fourth Quartets, composed in 2003 and 2004.

Both works are based upon Davies's now familiar range of technical devices - the magic squares, transformations of plainsong fragments and carefully plotted harmonic progressions - but they also graft on further musical references and carry layers of extra-musical allusion. No 3, with its minatory opening march, deliberately grotesque scherzo and bleak finale, is Davies's response to the invasion of Iraq, while the single-movement Fourth was designed to be much lighter and less aggressive than its predecessor, with Breughel's painting of children's games as its direct inspiration. There are moments in both works when the music seems to become almost automatic, not so much felt or imagined but more the product of Maxwell Davies's array of compositional processes. Then a striking idea opens up a new perspective and off it goes again.

Meanwhile, Davies is also maximising the availability of his music through his website Max Opus. It has always been an invaluable source of information on the composer, and now collectors can download recordings of works of their choice, or compile customised CDs which they then receive by mail, complete with a full set of sleeve notes usually by the composer himself. Sixty-one of Davies's pieces are available in this way: the recordings are a mixture of newly recorded performances alongside many, especially of the larger orchestral works, taken from the series of discs issued in the 1990s by the now defunct Collins Classics.

The three brought together on the disc sent to me are all recent pieces. The supple, contained septet Seven Skies of Winter was written for the Nash Ensemble to play at a concert at the 2004 St Magnus Festival in Orkney; Step By Circle is a choral setting of poems by George Mackay Brown also dating from last year. The big piece here is the single-movement Antarctic Symphony, the result of Davies's trip to the continent, which was first performed in 2001. This performance under the composer, not perfect but much more than adequate, originated at Radio Bremen in Germany. Each work is priced separately according to length; the sample disc would cost £6.85 plus postage, with downloads fractionally cheaper. As the big record companies get more and more wary of investing in contemporary music, other composers are likely to follow the path that Davies has forged.