Klaus Mäkelä Peter Maxwell Davies
Hector Berlioz

The English composer Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016) had a career full of contrasts. For ten years starting in 2004 he had the title of Master of the Queen’s Music and was the house composer for the Royal Household of the United Kingdom. When he became famous in the 1960s it was rather due to quite experimental music that audiences found shocking. Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) is based on the historical King George III’s mental illness. In the eight monologs scored for a baritone soloist, Maxwell Davies uses extended techniques to express the King’s madness.

Symphonie fantastique (1830) by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) is one of the great milestones in the history of orchestral music. The symphony depicts the heartache of a young artist, based on the composer’s own desperate infatuation with actress Harriet Smithson. In his despair the young artist takes opium, which Berlioz had personal experience doing. In the fourth movement, the effects of it kick in. During a hallucination he becomes a witness to his own execution and then in the last movement he is dragged into a vulgar and grotesque witches’ Sabbath.