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David Matthews: 7th Symphony triumphs at Mahler Festival!
A 21-minute symphony was introduced to audiences by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra on Saturday 24 April, at the much publicised Mahler Festival at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. Gianandrea Noseda conducted the world premiere of David Matthews’ 7th Symphony alongside Mahler’s 7th to an appreciative audience, which lacked one particular member – the composer himself, who was stranded in Australia due to the volcanic ash transport crisis.
The BBC commissioned Symphony proved to be an apt hors d'oeuvres to the Mahler, revealing Matthews' unrivalled talents as orchestrator, his continued inspiration from the work of Sibelius, and his ability to sustain a lyrical impulse throughout a well-balanced structure.
Press comments:
5* review in The Guardian
‘…a single-movement, four-section work that also has great beauty and richness. It rings endless changes on a rapturous viola melody, heard at the outset over tremulous violins, and reaches its climax with a dexterous percussion cadenza before bounding towards an exuberant close. Breathtakingly scored, it was superbly played.
Guardian (Tim Ashley), 27 April 2010
‘…As always in this series, Mahler’s symphony was paired with a new work specially written for the occasion. By a happy coincidence David Matthews’s new symphony was also his seventh, but there the resemblance ended. It had a Sibelius-like concentration, lasting barely 20 minutes, with different “movements” – fast and light, dark and slow – emerging and dissolving into the next with a skill Sibelius would have admired.
What makes Matthews’s music lovable is the way it embraces straightforwardly tonal means, with no tricksy post-modern irony or agonised breast-beating. This new symphony goes further in the direction of limpid simplicity. It takes daring to place a guileless melody over a row of major chords, but lending those things a subtle shapeliness and pregnant suggestiveness needs art, too, which this symphony had in abundance.’
Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 27 April 2010
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