This disc committed to chamber music of Colin Matthews is an entry in NMC's Ancora series, a worthy venture devoted to bringing back into print recordings of contemporary music by British composers that have been deleted. Some of these pieces go back to the LP era, and even had to be transferred from vinyl as the original masters have gone astray. Divertimento for double string quartet (1982) is a signature piece from Matthews and unique in his output, being an extrapolation from some of the harmonic material in
Richard Strauss' Metamorphosis rendered in Matthews' own style. It is a fascinating, tense, and dramatic work, as lush, familiar romantic gestures yield the floor to more agitated, dissonant material and back again in three seamless, fluid movements. A sense of the romantic also pervades the Oboe Quartet No. 1 (1981), written as a commission to celebrate the centenary of Nottingham University; although the harmonic language is more stringent than in the Divertimento, it maintains the same sense of continuous flow and forward movement. Triptych (1984), written for the
Schubert Ensemble, utilizes the same instrumentation as Schubert's Trout Quintet, though to considerably different ends as Schubert, while maintaining a sense of legato and logical progression; it is the gentlest of the works here. With the Five Concertinos for Wind Quintet (1990), we enter into a different area of Matthews' output, invoking not the eighteenth century but the twentieth, dipping into the world of Edgard Varèse with its stuttering rhythms and highly variable approach to texture; the third Concertino, Molto meccanico, is like a misshapen march played by a broken flute-clock mechanism. The disc closes with the String Quartet No. 2 (1985-1989), rolled out by the
Endellion Quartet in 1985 only to be withdrawn, its second movement being replaced with five very short movements of contrasting character; here it is played by the
Brindisi Quartet.
Matthews is a highly skilled synthesizer of elements drawing upon familiar late romantic and early modern styles; his music evokes that of Berg, Schoenberg,
Mahler, and others. He does not strive for originality in the accepted sense, but enjoys absolute mastery in the historic idioms he chooses to work in, not a particularly easy path to take given that the bar is set so high in such styles. These recordings are lovingly performed, often by the specific ensembles for which they were written, and NMC has done well to restore them to the catalog. There is a slight difference in sound quality between the pieces taken from vinyl versus the ones from original masters, but it does not significantly affect the listening experience.