MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Famous Composer's new Antarctic Symphony. Interested in Writing Falklands Musical Work.

The internationally renowned composer and conductor , Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who has written the first Antarctic Symphony for fifty years, says he would love to revisit the Falklands which, he says, could inspire him to write music about the Islands.

Sir Peter, who lives in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, was commissioned by the British Antarctic Survey to compose his symphony to mark the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams Sinfonia Antarctica, whose premiere he attended as a schoolboy student of music in Manchester in 1953.

In contrast to Vaughan Williams, who wrote the score for the film "Scott of the Antarctic" but never visited the Antarctic, it was a condition for Sir Peter's assignment that he had to go to Antarctica after passing stringent medical tests. Sir Peter spent a month in the Antarctic as a guest of BAS scientists. His symphony has its world premiere at London's Festival Hall on Saturday, May 6th, with him conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra.

He found this, his eight symphony a great challenge but derived unique inspiration from his Antarctica sojourn, which he graphically described in an interview with Mercopress.

"I experienced this extraordinary landscape and frozen seascape and a silence such as I have never known before...It was midsummer and a wonderful, wonderful experience --- the sheer physical pleasure of watching Rothera , the main BAS base, walking around freely and watching the sea change as the ice melted".

He also spent time in a tent on an ice shelf, which has since broken up and disappeared, and also at a remote little hut called Fossil Bluff on a cliff overlooking a frozen sea.

He came face to face with curious penguins, watched many seabirds and enjoyed the company of the BAS scientists whose work greatly impressed him. "They looked after me very well", he said, as he recalled the experiences and hardship endured by the great explorers like Scott and Shackleton whose literature, he says, fascinated him.

He remembers vividly the sound of breaking ice as the BAS Survey ship James Clark Ross broke her way through. These sounds and images he has incorporated in his symphony.

On his way back to the United Kingdom, he spent several days in the Falklands, with old friends, Tom Eggeling (Falklands Environmental Planning Officer) and his wife, Megan, whom he knew in the Orkney Islands, where Tom was Planning Officer. Sir Peter was impressed by the Islands and the people.

"I woul