Shouts of “Rubbish!” famously greeted Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King at its 1969 Proms premiere. Over half a century later, the composer’s modernist monodrama – George III the “mad king” of the title – has lost none of its feral power. To be shocked is to be numbed; artistically it’s not actually very interesting. What Eight Songs achieves is far more insidious: it makes you feel. And in this fierce account from the Manchester Camerata, conductor John Andrews and soprano Rosie Middleton we felt it all: every desperate clutch for sanity, every hairpin bend of reason, every queasy realisation and glassy-eyed forgetting.
Clever programming let us build up to the Maxwell Davies – looming slowly towards us in a concert gradually losing its grip on reason and order. Ophelia railed and cringed in Errollyn Wallen’s Hamlet-setting By Gis and Saint Charity – a theatrical miniature that packs a punch in barely five minutes of music. Cries and whispers of “Shame” break through the text, uttered not just by the soprano (here the compelling Rebecca Hardwick, balancing hysteria with a horrible glee) but flung at her by the string quartet, who otherwise conspire and feed her delusional fantasies.
