Aren't policemen looking young these days? I mean, can it really be a quarter of a century since Maxwell Davies's new works were regularly greeted by sharp intakes of breath (in the case of Vesalii icones at the presence on stage of a nearly naked dancer impersonating both the Stations of the Cross and a sequence of sixteenth-century anatomical engravings) and are we now seeing what might be termed a generation gap in Maxwell Davies's critical reception? Why, there are people now admiring his symphonies who weren't born when Vesalii icones was new, and the lady behind me in the Queen Elizabeth Hall who hissed ''disgusting!'', when at the end the Christ-figure was revealed as Antichrist, mockingly cursing the audience to the sound (of course) of a foxtrot, has probably been spared the shock of seeing its perpetrator appointed a Knight Bachelor and a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
In that sense the piece's shock value has certainly diminished, and of course on CD you can't see the dancer's sinuous writhings (no, I don't miss them: I don't think they added much). But it isn't just the absence of the visual element that emphasizes the work's underlying sobriety, its at times tender lyricism and its seriousness. You don't need to be religious to appreciate its central concern with distinguishing true from false in matters that concern faith, all the more troubling, surely, in an age that seems not to believe in anything much. In the sixth 'Station' Christ is mocked with insincere piety as well as blasphemy and the Cross itself, in the ensuing number, is itself a mockery. The death of Christ, no less disturbingly, is greeted by a lament from the solo cello, but also by a grotesque warning against sentimentalizing pain. Maxwell Davies describes the Antichrist of the final 'Station' as ''the dark 'double' of Christ of medieval legend'', but he is no less graphic an image of the false gods invented by sects—and politicians—for their own purposes.
Vesalii icones is also a score in which some of Maxwell Davies's perennial obsessions, especially parody in its general and its particular senses, can be heard all the more clearly for their 'programmatic' use for example the adding and subtracting of musical layers in the ingenious depiction of St Veronica's veil, with its at first 'genuine', then perturbingly distorted image of Christ's face. Maxwell Davies has moved on since then, but hasn't denied or left behind his former self. Because the scoring of the pieces is pretty consistent throughout, that is very apparent in the sparely beautiful The Bairns of Brugh, an Orkney piece from a dozen years later than Vesalii icones, even in the epigrammatic Runes there is no sense of Maxwell Davies retreating from the 'extremism' of 1969 to a cool, let alone a detached Orcadian exile. Excellent performances throughout; the recorded sound of Vesalii icones is, not inappropriately, a little edgier and less atmospheric than that of its companions.'