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 orchestrations of film music. He has also written a book on the music of Michael Tippett, and has just completed a book on Britten which will be published in spring 2003. He published a lecture on the relation of music to painting, Landscape into Sound, and reviews for various journals. Matthews is Music Advisor to the English Chamber Orchestra and Artistic Director of 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 new ways of renewing them. To date he has written five symphonies and ten string quartets; also four symphonic poems – two of which; In the Dark Time and Chaconne, have recently been recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the NMC label. His numerous chamber works include commissions by 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. His recent large-scale work, Concerto in Azzurro is a cello concerto for Steven Isserlis and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and was premiered in October 2002 in Swansea with Richard Hickox.
January 2003
Forthcoming performances:
Symphony No 5
10.6.10, St John's Church Waterloo, London, United Kingdom: Southbank Sinfonia
Aubade
10.6.10, St John's Church Waterloo, London, United Kingdom: Southbank Sinfonia
Fanfares and Flowers
18.7.10, Royal Northern College of Music, United Kingdom: National Youth Wind Ensemble of Great Britain
Dark Pastoral (world premiere)
5.9.10, London, United Kingdom: Steven Isserlis/BBC Concert Orchestra/Paul Daniel
Actaeon (London premiere)
25.10.10, Kings Place, London, United Kingdom: Counterpoise Ensemble