THE RETIRING Master of the Queen’s Music, composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is 80 this year and features prominently at the Proms, which begin this weekend. He will appear in person for his Fifth Symphony and other works, though he was not expected to see this summer after his struggle with leukaemia last year. Doctors gave him six weeks.“At my age,” says Max, as he is universally known, “the survival rate from chemotherapy is very small and even to get that chemo­therapy you have to be terribly fit, so it’s an absolute miracle that I’m still alive.” Max has not slowed down and was exhausted after travelling home to Orkney for last month’s St Magnus Festival, which he founded in 1977, six years after moving to the remote archipelago. En