David Matthews - Terrible Beauty . Clarinet Quartet. Marina. String Trios – No 1; No 2. Winter Passions

Susan Bickley (mez) Stephan Loges (bar) Nash Ensemble / Lionel Friend

NMC NMCD152 Buy now

(75’ • DDD • T)

The “winter passions” are those of the poet Pushkin, as translated by DM Thomas and set to music by David Matthews in 1999. The baritone protagonist in this short cycle is the very opposite of Schubert’s melancholic wanderer, and Matthews’s ability to write music which is not merely “upbeat” but expressively wide-ranging and emotionally exuberant is heard here at its best.

This disc places three works from the 1980s alongside three more recent scores. 
In the first group, Matthews’s unfussily imaginative setting of Eliot’s Marina is framed by two concise instrumental dramas, the Clarinet Quartet and the First String Trio: this last piece is especially intriguing for the way Matthews inflects some not-un-Tippett-like figuration in the direction of the kind of more abrasive pop idioms he admires.

The second group comprises Winter Passions, the Second String Trio (2003) and Terrible Beauty (2007). The Trio shares its concentrated animation with Matthews’s Tenth String Quartet, written a little earlier, and complements the quartet’s use of Australian birdsong with allusions to Indian music. For Terrible Beauty Matthews has used words by Yeats for his title but the main text is Enobarbus’s celebrated narrative from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, prefaced by a passage from Homer’s Iliad describing a different if no less tantalising royal personage. Well- mannered musical accompaniment has no place here, and Matthews’s bold eloquence takes on an evocative late-Romantic quality – Zemlinsky, early Schoenberg – that moves forward with rapt determination. Performance values are of the highest throughout this disc.

Arnold  Whittall