On track: Chamber music taken to the wider world

Faith is a rare commodity in our cynical, materialistic times. Yet, in the field of classical music recording, it is a feature shared by all the enterprising labels committed to capturing the music and performers of our time.

Naxos, well known for its exhaustive surveys of obscure music from sometimes exotic concert cultures, has now taken a new and brave step, commissioning 10 Naxos Quartets from the English composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

Here is a man who was a firebrand in his time, touring the world (including New Zealand) with his Fires of London ensemble and taking time off to pen a wicked, wacky score for Ken Russell's The Boyfriend.

Ever unpredictable, Davies turned symphonist in 1976 and now manages to combine being Master of the Queen's Music with living in rural isolation on the Orkney Islands.

The latest instalment of his Naxos Quartets features No 5 and 6. The Maggini Quartet has never played better, and Andrew Walton's recording is pantheon standard. Try the second movement of No 5, inspired by the beneficent beams of northern Scotland's lighthouses.

There's some meltdown dissonance, but this is tempered by warm, Bergian harmonies and a magical fade-out, in which the sweep of a man-made beam succumbs to nature's first light.

Davies now finds new rewards in the intellectual and aesthetic discipline of the quartet and has created textbooks of musical influences, without threatening his individuality.

Such influences are sometimes hard to pin down. The second movement of No 6 might be based on plainsong, but audiences must hear Ravelian echoes in its pizzicato scherzo.

But we shouldn't be surprised at such catholic taste, when earlier Naxos Quartets have already travelled so widely, from the nods to Beethoven and Haydn in No 1 through to the Bachian intensity of No 3, the composer's fiery reaction to the 2003 Iraq War.

Some listeners will find a source of spiritual contemplation in the Naxos Quartets; others the same intellectual stimulation found in the world of words. Davies' ultimate victory is that he has taken chamber music out into the wider world and asserted its relevance.

* Peter Maxwell Davies, Naxos Quartets 5 and 6 (Naxos 8.557398)