The Â鶹Éç Philharmonic has enjoyed a fruitful relationship lasting over 40 years with the English composer David Matthews. Today, we celebrate his 80th birthday with a concert conducted by Â鶹Éç Philharmonic Chief Conductor John StorgÃ¥rds with baritone Marcus Farnsworth.
David Matthews's relationship with the Â鶹Éç began in 1980, and his work soon drew the attention of the Â鶹Éç Philharmonic. Our birthday celebrations begin today with Matthews’s recent jubilant Concerto for Orchestra. Its outer movements are sets of spring and summer dances; nestling between them is a nocturne which moves through the night from dusk to a daybreak marked by gentle birdcalls and leading to a full-throated dawn chorus.
Chaconne had its premiere in 1988 and was the first of many commissions from the Â鶹Éç Philharmonic. Matthews has described Chaconne as being conceived as "slow, meditative music with several faster episodes: one fantastic, one dreamlike, and one evoking 'the distant fury of battle' of Geoffrey Hill’s poem of that name."
Matthews is a composer whose music looks forward as well as backwards, and his Nachtgesang, written for the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in 2015 and receiving its first UK performance today, was inspired by the poetry of the German Romantic poet Goethe, in particular his poem of that title Night Song. Franz Schubert set many of Goethe’s poems to music, and Matthews’s tribute is surrounded by some of Schubert’s settings of Goethe’s words in orchestrations by Reger and Brahms.
