SICPP AT NEC
PETER MAXWELL DAVIES MAD SCENES

By Lloyd Schwartz |  July 01, 2004

It’s been a while since we’ve heard any major works by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, but this absence was remedied by Stephen Drury, the iconoclastic pianist and director of the New England Conservatory’s annual week-long Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (SICPP — pronounced "sick puppies"). Drury staged and conducted a double bill of Maxwell Davies’s one-act, one-character theater pieces: Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) and the equally demented Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (1974).

Both are studies in dementia. The mad king is George III, who talks to birds. Librettist Randolph Stow uses actual quotations from the monarch better known here for losing a revolution than for losing his mind. Eliza Donnithorne is one of the sources of Dickens’s Miss Havisham, the bizarre spinster in Great Expectations who never left her house — or her moldy wedding cake — after being jilted. In both works, through the cacophony come echoes, memories, funhouse-mirror distortions of earlier styles: 18th-century dances, bel canto opera, ragtime. With some gorgeous interludes.

Drury’s Callithumpian Consort is a group of stellar young musicians: Gabriela Diaz (violin), Benjamin Schwartz (cello), Natalie Pao (flute), Michael Norsworthy (clarinet), Timothy Feeney (percussion), and Drury’s favorite pianist, Yukiko Takagi. And he had them interact aggressively with the solo singers. They assaulted and tormented baritone Brian Church’s mad king; in a shocking moment, Church grabbed Diaz’s violin and sawed away at it — then Diaz took it back and smashed it! (Not, I guess, her best violin.) In Miss Donnithorne, the guys lifted soprano Jennifer Ashe onto the piano; from the back of Jordan Hall, they shouted the obscenities she herself edits out. The women players appeared to the virginal but sex-obsessed Miss D as quasi-pornographic images (Pao in particularly convincing S&M black).

Both singers are too young to look their parts, so Drury circumvented the issue by making them deranged young inmates of the same "Every-Asylum" (balloons, aching to be popped, hovered over the stage). Singers can ruin their voices on the wild moans, shrieks, and coloratura mad scenes (Church had to sing a falsetto parody of Handel’s Messiah), but these two recent NEC graduates demonstrated rock-solid vocal technique, and Ashe’s voice has the kind of vocal velvet you don't often hear in contemporary music.