Maxwell Davies; Taverner : Hill/Wilson Johnson/Fretwork/London Voices/New London Children's Choir/BBCSO/Knussen

Of the many ways that Peter Maxwell Davies's 75th birthday this year might have been marked on disc, the release of a recording of his first opera, Taverner, is just about the perfect one. No single work in Davies's now-voluminous ­output has greater significance in his composing career – dominating almost a decade and a half of his early ­development – or crystallises more ­intensely the power and energy of his music in that period. The premiere of Taverner at Covent Garden in 1972 was one of the landmarks in British post-war music, and despite the success of ­Davies's works preceding it, including Eight Songs for a Mad King, and the huge orchestral piece Worldes Blis, gave shape and definition to his achievement in the 1960s especially.

The almost total neglect of the score since the ROH premiere and one revival there is inexplicable. As this ­outstanding 1996 BBC studio performance conducted by Oliver Knussen shows, Taverner is a work that blazes with theatricality and dramatic power, and is underpinned by a score of remarkable variety and sometimes visceral intensity. The life of a Tudor composer might seem an odd subject for an opera, but John Taverner (1490-1545) lived through extraordinary times, and, as one version of history had it, became the most celebrated composer in a ­Catholic England, only to end his ­career during the dissolution of the monasteries as a Protestant zealot, ­prosecuting those who clung to the old faith, having rejected his own music ­altogether. Though that biography is now known to be false, it suited to ­Davies's dramatic purpose perfectly, for his Taverner is about truth and ­falsehood, distinguishing one from the other and the price to be paid for artistic integrity in doing so.

Davies's vocal and orchestral forces are vast; and with its constant use of Taverner's own music as a thematic source, his score is an extraordinary ­labyrinth of transformation. But as Knussen and his superb cast, led by the tenor Martyn Hill as Taverner himself, with David Wilson Johnson as the Jester and Stephen Richardson as the King, constantly demonstrate, it is also wonderfully communicative, and the whole bundle of issues it confronts, religious, political and artistic, are as relevant ­today as in the 16th century, or when Davies composed the work in the 1960s.