It’s been a busy year for Peter Maxwell Davies, the septuagenarian Scottish composer named earlier this year as Master of the Queen’s Music. At an age when many composers are content to bask in their legacy, Maxwell Davies is composing ten string quartets, keeping up his lifelong interest in left-wing politics, and writing children’s music for a festival he helped to found. “Davies himself sees no problems in fecundity. He has always been that sort of composer, and age has not slowed him. Indeed, like Mozart before him, he could almost be described as accelerating towards oblivion.”