Davies Brings Scot Links to Symphony Hall Concert

During the tenure of San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell, the 1986 production of Peter Maxwell Davies’ chamber opera “The Lighthouse” stands out as the company’s most musically exciting hour. Though it was not a box office success--the local “Boheme”- and “Butterfly”-loving opera buffs stayed away in droves--it put San Diego audiences in touch with a distinctive and distinguished voice in contemporary music.

Thursday night at Symphony Hall, Davies will conduct two of his recent orchestral works with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the opening concert of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s downtown Celebrity Series. For the last three years, Davies has been that orchestra’s associate composer-conductor, a role he accepted at the urging of members of the orchestra.

In his composing mode, Davies is a bit of a recluse, living in the remote Orkney Islands off northern Scotland.

“I chose this area because of its quietness, as well as its natural beauty. There are no engine noises. There, a car can’t even get near my house,” he explained over the phone from his San Francisco hotel last week. San Francisco was the initial stop on the orchestra’s first trip to the American West Coast.

Unlike poor old Gustav Mahler, whose conducting career was a major distraction from his first love, composition, Davies claims to have found conducting a refreshing complement to composing.

“I find that conducting Haydn and Beethoven is a fantastic composition lesson,” he said. “With their music happening all around you, you get insights you don’t get any other way.”

Both of Davies’ works in the Symphony Hall concert have Scottish connections. The instrumentation of his 1985 work, “An Orkney Wedding,” calls for bagpipe, the Scottish national instrument since the 15th Century. Fortunately, it is not unusual for classically trained Scottish musicians to learn to play the bagpipes. Davies noted that Neil Johnson, the cellist in his orchestra who plays the pipes, is the son of one of Scotland’s most famous bagpipe teachers.

The other Davies opus, “Strathclyde Concerto No. 1 for Oboe and Orchestra,” is part of a five-year project to write 10 concertos for principal chairs in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. This ambitious project, one that recalls Haydn and his orchestra at Esterhazy, is underwritten by the Strathclyde, the region surrounding Glasgow, one of the orchestra’s two home cities.

To be proper, the 54-year-old composer should be referred to as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, since Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1987 for his contributions to British music.

FLUTE FOR THOUGHT: Because the instrument bears an uncanny resemblance to the plumbing found beneath kitchen sinks, the bass flute might easily be dismissed as a musical joke. UC San Diego music researcher and performer John Sebastian Winston, however, urged a degree of tolerance toward this strange breed of flute, which is designed to emit sounds an octave below the standard orchestral flute.

“It’s just a lonely instrument in search of a repertoire,” he said.

Winston has been described as the sort of musician who never saw a flute he didn’t like. When he bought a bass flute a couple of years ago while playing in a commercially oriented instrumental trio, he quickly discovered that there was little music written for the bass flute. While researching the instrument’s modest history, he discovered that its most popular usage had been in musical scores for B-grade horror films. In face of these evident wrongs perpetrated on the bass flute, he decided to give the instrument the respect it deserved by commissioning a number of composers he knew to write solo pieces for bass flute.

Thus far he has enticed a dozen composers, including several European colleagues, to come up with new music. In the case of more established composers, such as UCSD’s Joji Yuasa and Britain’s Robert Platz, he was able to cross their palms with the silver of grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Welsh Arts Council. But for other, younger composers, just the challenge of conceiving music for the unusual instrument--and the guarantee that Winston would perform it--was sufficient impetus to put pen to staff paper.

One benefit of Winston’s crusade for the bass flute surfaced at this summer’s Darmstadt International Contemporary Music Festival, where Chaya Schwarz’s settings of two Hebraic poems, “Manoalchadia,” for bass flute and two sopranos, won the UCSD composer a composition prize.

HALLOWEEN IN THE PARK: Civic organist Robert Plimpton has announced a gala Halloween concerto be given Oct. 31 at Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ Pavilion. Plimpton will perform the usual organ pieces associated with Halloween, J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and an arrangement of Berlioz’s “March to the Scaffold” from the “Symphonie Fantastique.” He will be assisted by a cadre of singers who will perform a medley from Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera.” Civic organist and singers will be in costume, and they are inviting the audience to join them in appropriate holiday garb.