Here are three major works by Colin Matthews (b. 1946), from the mid 1970s (Fourth Sonata), mid 1980s (Suns Dance) and early 1990s (Broken Symmetry). They make an intriguing sequence – no, let’s drop the pretence of intellectual detachment: the word is devastating. The Fourth Sonata shows Matthews in his late twenties reacting to American minimalism, but coming up with something utterly personal: angrily pulsating rhythms, textures full of jagged edges, anguished string harmonies – music that looks forward to Adams’s The Chairman Dances and backward to the Mahlerian nightmare scherzo. But Matthews does allow himself a vision of what you might call qualified hope at the end – a radiantly scored dawn in a sort of D major.
The same dark urgency dominates Suns Dance – a ballet for ten instruments with a power out of all proportion to its instrumental means – and Broken Symmetry, a kind of extended scherzo for very large orchestra. But now there are no images of consolation. Suns Dance sounds like a piece possessed by its own energy: it’s dance till you drop – or until the music lets you drop. Formal outlines are more obvious in Broken Symmetry (especially if you follow DG’s helpful tracking), but the scherzo-trio sequence seems increasingly challenged by forces from within. The ending finally fulfils the promise of the title: a fabulously scored pulsating crescendo swells, then breaks apart – a few fragmentary sounds, then silence. Matthews’s language is very different from that of Robert Simpson, but there is more than a passing resemblance to the end of Simpson’s Fifth Symphony. It’s a similar sequence: elemental violence, explosion, collapse. In both works the effect is grim, but at the same time tremendously exhilarating – like surviving a musical white-knuckle ride.
Of course, the effect depends partly on the performances. Whether reduced to ten players or amplified to nearer 100, the London Sinfonietta play with breathtaking energy and precision for Oliver Knussen – one of the keenest-eared and most genuinely enthusiastic conductors on the current scene. The forward sweep is there, but so are the details; the impression is of an explosively fertile imagination. The recordings help, too: clarity of focus without dryness – it’s essential that the orchestral sound at the end of the Fourth Sonata should expand warmly; it does here. Few contemporary music discs get it right as thoroughly as this one has. I would recommend it to anyone with stamina and a sense of adventure.
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