composers

David Matthews

• Y Deryn Du (The Blackbird)

David Matthews was born in London in 1943 and started composing at the age of sixteen. He read Classics at the University of Nottingham - which has also made him an Honorary Doctor of Music - and afterwards studied composition privately with Anthony Milner. He was also much helped by the advice and encouragement of Nicholas Maw. He spent three years as an assistant to Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh in the late 1960's. He has largely avoided teaching, but to support his composing career has done editorial work - he collaborated with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony - and orchestration of film music. He has also written a book on the music of Michael Tippett, a published lecture on the relation of music to painting, Landscape into Sound, and articles and reviews for various journals. Matthews is Music Advisor to the English Chamber Orchestra and Artistic Director to the Deal Festival. His music is widely played in Britain and abroad, is frequently broadcast, and over a dozen of his works are available on CD.

His musical language on the one hand grew out of his English background and his special concern for the music of Tippett, Britten and Maw; but it is also strongly connected to the central European tradition, back through Mahler and ultimately to Beethoven. Matthews has been much concerned with working in the great inherited forms of the past - symphony, string quartet, lately oratorio - and finding ways of renewing them. He has written six symphonies – the sixth was premiered at the BBC Proms in 2007 by the National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Jac van Steen, ten string quartets; also four symphonic poems - two of which, In the Dark Time and Chaconne, have been recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the NMC label. His numerous chamber works include commissions for the Schubert Ensemble, Nash Ensemble, Brodsky Quartet, Brindisi Quartet and many others; vocal music includes a dramatic scena, Cantiga, for soprano and orchestra, premiered at the 1988 Proms, and a large-scale Vespers for soloists, chorus and orchestra for the Huddersfield Choral Society.