Maxwell Davies: Piano Sonata

[barnardo]

It has been nearly thirty years since I last performed the 1981 Piano Sonata of Peter Maxwell Davies, and I am currently relearning the whole work. In my student days I researched the piece a great deal, and I heard performances whenever possible as well as collecting the three commercial recordings I know of as they have been released. What are others experiences of this music? Certainly for me it is an endlessly fascinating and challenging work, requiring a healthy performance tradition that has admittedly had a slow evolution over the first few decades! Apart from the formal features of the work it seems to me that there is a huge richness of pianistic variety to enjoy and discover, for both listeners and performers. My own goal is to achieve the most persuasive performance possible within a necessarily generous timescale.

My adventures and thoughts during the relearning and recording of Peter Maxwell Davies' Piano Sonata are detailed on a new blog at https://bernardpulham.wordpress.com/
Discussions are welcome!