The last two Saturday matinees at the Proms this summer each mark the 80th birthday of one of this country's greatest living composers. Next weekend, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group will pay tribute to Harrison Birtwistle. TOn Saturday, their capital counterparts, the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Sian Edwards, celebrated Peter Maxwell Davies's anniversary.
The composer had devised the programme himself, bringing together three works from different decades of his 60-year career. The most recent was the plainchant-haunted Linguae Ignis, for cello and ensemble, from 2002. The soloist was the Sinfonietta's principal cellist, Tim Gill, who epitomised the fluency of Davies's later style, evident here in a main climax that reveals the hard-edged fierceness that has never deserted the composer's music. The other two pieces rank among Davies's finest achievements, and therefore among the greatest works written in England in the past 50 years.
Revelation and Fall, composed in 1966, is almost half a century old now. This setting of an expressionist poem by Georg Trakl still packs a visceral punch, though its use of a loud-hailer has lost a bit of its shock value now, and the 25-minute piece wasn't staged here as Davies originally specified, with the soprano dressed in a scarlet nun's habit. But Rebecca Bottone did wear a scarlet dress, and handled Davies's extremely challenging vocal writing with wonderful precision. Even so, the balance in Cadogan Hall wasn't always perfect; Radio 3 listeners probably got a better perspective than we did.
A Mirror of Whitening Light, on the other hand, which Davies composed for the Sinfonietta in 1977, glittered and darted as bewitchingly as it did at its first performance. We may hear this impression of the changing light outside the composer's study window on Hoy with different ears these days – the rising trombone line towards the end, for instance, now seems unmistakably Sibelian – but, as Edwards' performance showed, the freshness and spontaneity of its invention remain dazzlingly potent.
• On BBC iPlayer until 27 September. The Proms continue until 13 September.
