MATTHEWS Symphony No 9 (Woods)

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: David Matthews

Genre:

Orchestral

Label: Nimbus Alliance

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 64

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: NI6382

NI6382. MATTHEWS Symphony No 9 (Woods)

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Symphony No 9 David Matthews, Composer
David Matthews, Composer
English Symphony Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, Conductor
Variations for Strings David Matthews, Composer
David Matthews, Composer
English String Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, Conductor
Sara Trickey, Violin
Sarah-Jane Bradley, Viola
Double Concerto for Violin and Viola David Matthews, Composer
David Matthews, Composer
English String Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, Conductor
Sara Trickey, Violin
Sarah-Jane Bradley, Viola
Pretty much every major symphonist from Brahms to Maxwell Davies leaves a trace on the Ninth Symphony of David Matthews. The inference drawn, however, need not be of a synthetic assimilation. Some would say the symphony is now a musical outfitters of dead men’s clothes. Matthews contends otherwise in a cycle that has steadily gathered momentum and purpose during the past decade to culminate (for now) in a cogent five-movement structure.

In fact, it’s Haydn who comes to mind – no small compliment – in the initial unfolding of a modest carol melody and its unexpected capacity for symphonic heavy lifting. A motivic fragment of the melody then forms the basis of both a pounding, ostinato scherzo and its slower central episode (in four, not a trio), and it doesn’t require perusal of the score to hear the kinship of the carol with a briefer fourth-movement waltz, more pastorally scored but shadowed in the manner of Max (or Hardy or the Eclogues of Virgil for that matter) by a looming threat to the idyll. Fading out inconclusively over Sibelian pizzicato strings, the conflict is fought afresh and won by a good old-fashioned finale over which the carol melody comes to ring out in a C major happy ending.

That leaves the central slow movement – and indeed the six-minute elegy at the heart of the Ninth doesn’t bear the weight of expectation upon such a structural fulcrum. Echoes of birdsong, of Vaughan Williams and Lutosławski, draw the piece away from the goal of renewal which is the theme of the carol, the symphony and perhaps of Matthews’s symphonic career.

The Ninth Symphony received its first performance at the hands of these performers last year, and at the same time they made this admirable albeit slightly congested recording in St George’s, Bristol. There is more space to the engineering and more finesse to the execution of the two string-orchestra pieces recorded at Great Malvern Priory.

Dating from 1986, a set of eight variations on a troubled Bach chorale deserves a place in the canon of celebrated English string literature from Purcell through to Elgar, Bridge and Tippett. Birdsong returns in the Double Concerto of 2013, which celebrates friendship rather than competition without attaining the sureness of purpose or distinctive profile of its companion works, for all the delicacy and sympathy of the partnership between Sara Trickey and Sarah-Jane Bradley.

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