<<  -- 4 --  Roderic Dunnett    Sublimely sensual

Matthews's recorded works include Cantiga (superbly performed by Jill Gomez with seven of his Mahler arrangements on Unicorn-Kanchana, available from Harold Moores Record Shop under Matthews), the ebullient tangoing Fourth Symphony (sadly not easily available now on the deleted Collins label, but hopefully to be rereleased soon by NMC), and In the Dark Time (a huge canvas -- the eerie title comes from T S Eliot) -- studded with richly alluring, finer-textured passages of mystery, curiosity and enchantment, inventively couched in heavenward soaring or widely spaced strings and ingeniously scored brass, woodwind and unexpected percussion.

Each serves, like his Violin Concertos, as excellent introductions to David Matthews's music. One has only to listen to, say, the unexpected transition between the fourth and fifth sections of In the Dark Time, or the woodwind aubade of the sixth, or to the slow unfolding, ingeniously structured (qv Beethoven and Tippett's Quartets) and by turns enraptured and tense Chaconne [listen] (a similar aubade, latterly coloured by unexpected saxophone and wonderful motorised string whispers not without a debt to Tippett's Corelli Fantasia, informs its fourth section; the final passages are a marvellous Mahler adagio in miniature, laced with autumnal Schoenberg and an unashamedly Ivesian evanescence : both of these superb works are to be found on the BBC Symphony Orchestra's dazzling new recording under Jac van Steen, issued on the NMC label only this year). Likewise The Music of Dawn (a profoundly evocative spiritual descendant of La Mer) joins them in confirming David Matthews as one of the most inspired orchestrators (compare Lutoslawski) and sublimely sensual and engagingly impressionistic of composers writing today : music to bathe in and wonder at, utterly approachable, without the slightest hint of banality.