Despite his fierce reputation as a composer to frighten the horses, Peter Maxwell Davies has always traded his instinctive modernism against a dialogue of music of the past. Ave Maris Stella, written in 1975, is a signature piece and a tour-de-force. Maxwell Davies constructs the work from transformed plainsong testing his musicians to a tipping-point of impossibility with unrelenting virtuosic challenges. Another inspiration was, perhaps, Beethoven as the opening cello line hovers around the memory of the Op. 131 String Quartet – a sphinx-like compositional enigma, brilliantly decoded by Gemini.