ABSTRACT
According to Andrew Bum, ‘If Scenes and Arias had marked the first watershed in Nicholas Maw’s career, then Odyssey was the second’. In positioning Odyssey as Maw’s second ‘watershed’ Bum is, correctly, situating this work as a pivotal moment, one that not only demands attention on its own terms but also poses questions about its relationship to the context that surrounds it. One of the most substantial works to overlap with Odyssey is The World in the Evening. The Royal Opera House Orchestra and Bernard Haitink premiered this orchestral work in 1988, after the first, truncated, performance of Odyssey. Given the close proximity of the two works, it is tempting, and perhaps too convenient, to search for connections and convergences. If The World in the Evening reflected something of the structural and harmonic shape of Odyssey, then Music of Memory for solo guitar suggests a certain correlation through the construction of memory while also creating its own distinctive soundworld.
