Continuing my exploration of the music of Peter Maxwell Davies I’ve been listening to a 1992 recording of a couple of very different pieces inspired by Orkney.  The first is Black Pentecost from 1979.  It’s somewhere between an orchestral song cycle and a symphony inspired by the threat to start mining uranium ore on Orkney (which also produced the very lovely piano piece Farewell to Stromness).  It’s a four movement work for orchestra, mezzo-soprano and baritone and it’s uncompromisingly modern in idiom.  The text depicts environmental destruction and decay and “the Controller”s increasingly strident justification of it as necessary to “human progress”.  It begins with orchestral music evocative of the unspoiled landscape but becomes increasingly tougher with menacing brass and percussion and screechy vocals from the baritone before collapsing into a matter of fact description of environmental degradation.

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