CD: Maxwell Davies: String Quartets Nos 5 & 6, Maggini Quartet

The eighth of Peter Maxwell Davies's Naxos Quartets was first performed in Canterbury a month ago; two remain to complete the set, and so far the first six have been released on disc. Though by the standards of some of the works in the series, the Fifth and Sixth Quartets are relatively modest in their proportions, both are still substantial, intricately structured works that demonstrate not only the sheer facility of Davies's invention and his dogged ability to sustain his fascination with the quartet medium, but also how his imagination can be triggered by such different things. Where the six-movement plan of the Sixth owes an obvious and acknowledged debt to Beethoven's late quartets, the Fifth is subtitled Lighthouses of Orkney and Shetland, referring not only to the sweep of lighthouse beams across the northern seascapes, but also to the different patterns of flashes that distinguish one lighthouse from another. The Fifth's two-movement structure seems more densely and more strikingly sustained than the rangier plan of its successor, though the Maggini Quartet are as authoritative as ever in both works.