It also parodies Carl Orff – never my favourite composer, a lot of his writing gets pretty overblown, so it seemed apt here, when I want to emphasise the ringing hollowness and empty rhetoric implicit in some of the Republican and Imperial architecture, as well as the Mussolini-era monuments. The second movement is about Rome’s hidden mysterious beauties. I’ve entitled it, in Greek, Ploutos Aphanes (literally hidden wealth) – I wanted the association with Pluto, the idea of the city at night as a kind of Hades full of riches, something dark and mysterious – I was thinking of James Joyce’s Dublin in the Circe chapter of Ulysses. It’s a nocturne, if you like.”There are, references to street bagpipes, and itinterant mandoline, brass bands and military music, folksy or kitsch or fusty restaurant music and church music. And the slow movement, ends with an extraordinary mock-folk tune, a vivid memory Davies has of walking back to his student pad not far from the Vatican and hearing “in a rarely open small church, I think San Giorgio in Velabro near the Tiber, elderly townswomen in black shawls singing with an openness and purity and innocence I found moving and inspiring”.Roma’s last movement is entitled “Manet in Aevum”, and refers – amid the city noises and snarls of congested traffic (how Ives or Debussy or Respighi would have loved all that: “I was very conscious of someone having been here before, though I feel what I’ve done is very different, it tries to be more searching on every level – it’s more than a pretty picture postcard, and a lot angrier”) – to Rome’s eternity.Here Maxwell Davies returns to the image of St Michael “weigher and judge of souls”, high on the Castel San Angelo, and often – almost obsessively, he says, – epitomised in his music by passages of high trumpet over sustained strings, before the bells of the entire city – first one small tinkle and then the entire vast array, dominated by St Peter’s Basilica – ring out in a great Mussorgskian blaze of celebration. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies will conduct the Royal Philharmonic in his ‘Mavis in Las Vegas’ and the premieres of his Horn Concerto and ‘Roma, Amor, Labyrinthus’ at the Barbican, London on Tuesday, 2 May Box office: 020-7638 8891.

The concert programme promised a “Legend of Opera”, which immediately sets you thinking: that the singer is, on the one hand, one of the greats, and, on the other, probably a bit past it In fact, Maria Ewing. Last month she turned 50, for a soprano the age of elegant maturity rather than decline; and as to being one of the greats, she has always been celebrated more for the intensity of her performances than for the lustre of her voice. The concert programme promised a “Legend of Opera”, which immediately sets you thinking: that the singer is, on the one hand, one of the greats, and, on the other, probably a bit past it In fact, Maria Ewing. Last month she turned 50, for a soprano the age of elegant maturity rather than decline; and as to being one of the greats, she has always been celebrated more for the intensity of her performances than for the lustre of her voice.
Which is not to diminish the voice, only to suggest that “legend” rather overstates the case. Certainly Ewing could not be faulted for versatility; few sopranos will attempt, in a single evening, to go from Rossini to Wagner by way of Bizet and Puccini, but that’s the kind of nerve which has won Ewing her reputation. And nerve is what it takes if you’re going to invite your audience to sing along in the “tra-la-la’s” of one of the arias from Carmen.More than that, it requires charisma to get the audience actually to do it, but Ewing succeeded Not everything was that showbizzy.

Carmen caught her at her best, slinking on stage to eye the orchestra with haughty malevolence before fixing the arena with her “come hither” stare. Ewing, holding herself with the poise of a dancer, radiated erotic tension. Her voice is light, which if fine for Carmen, to often a role reduced to blatancy but here delivered with some delicacy, as well as considerable vocal liberty.If there were signs of straight when she pushed for extra volume there was also a pleasing intimacy. Although she is not a natural Wagnerian, the breathy lightness of her voice gave a welcome bel canto shapeliness to the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, even if, here and elsewhere, too many consonants disappeared in the effort required to ride Wagner’s exorbitant vocal line.But Ewing isn’t about verbal precision, she’s about drama. In a couple of duets with Khosrow Mahsoori, a decent if not yet a distinguished tenor, her sense of the music’s physical passion contrasted with his more upright demeanour: her performance leaves the atmosphere of the Opera House, while he remained in the concert hall.