David Matthews holds the English Symphony Orchestra’s “John McCabe Composer-in-Association” Chair. In 2018-9, the ESO, The Elgar Festival and the Orchestra of the Swan are joining forces for a year-long celebration of Matthews’ music contributions to British music celebrating his 75th birthday, “Matthews in the Midlands.”
The 2018 Elgar Festival includes performances of Matthews’ orchestration of the Elgar String Quartet, his own String Quartet no. 6 and the world premiere of his string quartet arrangement of Elgar’s Sospiri.
David Matthews was born in London in 1943 and started composing at the age of sixteen. He read Classics at the University of Nottingham – where he has more recently been made an Honorary Doctor of Music – and afterwards studied composition privately with Anthony Milner. He was also helped by the advice and encouragement of Nicholas Maw and spent three years as an assistant to Benjamin Britten in the late 1960s. He has largely avoided teaching, but has undertaken editorial work to support his composing career, collaborating with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony and orchestrating film music. He has written books on the music of Tippett and Britten, published a lecture on the relation of music to painting and penned numerous reviews for music journals. Matthews is Music Advisor to the English Chamber Orchestra and was Artistic Director of the Deal Festival for 13 years. In 2013 he was included in the Evening Standard’s Power 1000 list of London’s most influential people.
On the one hand Matthews’ musical language 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 to Beethoven. He has been preoccupied with working in the great inherited forms of the past – symphony, string quartet, and lately oratorio – and finding new ways of renewing them. Recordings of his symphonic output have attracted many appreciative reviews with Matthews being dubbed ‘among our most prodigious symphonists’ (The Sunday Times, Paul Driver) and ‘a leading 21st Century exponent of the form’ (Gramophone, Arnold Whittall). In 2011, the Dutton recording of his Second and Sixth Symphonies received a prestigious BBC Music Magazine Award. The symphonic poems In the Dark Time and Chaconne have been recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra on NMC. Matthews has written prodigiously for string quartet and his most recent string quartet, the twelfth, was premiered by the Kreutzer Quartet at Wilton’s Music Hall in London in 2011. His dramatic scena, Cantiga, for soprano and orchestra, premiered at the 1988 Proms whilst Concerto in Azzurro (a cello concerto for Steven Isserlis and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Richard Hickox) was nominated for a BBC Radio 3 Listeners’ Award in 2003.
Matthews’ 70th birthday in 2013 was marked by a Nash Ensemble portrait concert at the Wigmore Hall – which included the premiere of A Blackbird Sang, a quartet for flute and strings – a major symphonic poem, A Vision of the Sea, premiered at the Proms by the BBC Philharmonic and a Double Concerto for violin, viola and strings co-commissioned by the Presteigne and Cheltenham Festivals. A birthday publication, David Matthews: Essays, Tributes and Criticism, was published by Plumbago Press and in his anthem To what God shall we chant our songs of battle? was broadcast live on BBC Television as part of a vigil at Westminster Abbey commemorating the outbreak of the First World War. Matthews’ latest symphony, his eighth, was premiered in April by the BBC Philharmonic. He was Composer in Residence at the 2015 Lichfield Festival.