The Last Island: chamber music by Peter Maxwell Davies

This wonderfully varied and vividly recorded collection gathers together many of the late Peter Maxwell Davies’s last works. He had a long history with the Hebrides Ensemble and they play these often-intimate pieces with real love. The sextet, The Last Island, is deeply haunting, while the String Trio of 2008, written in memory of a murdered Orcadian, touches the heart with its gentle passion and intensity. The unfinished String Quartet, Maxwell Davies’s last work, is full of vivid colours and inventive imagery, proof of his intellectual and creative vigour right to the end.