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Asked at a pre-performance event why when approaching the age of 80 he had ventured on his first opera, Colin Matthews replied that he didn’t think he should leave it as late as his American colleague Elliott Carter, who essayed his own at the age of 90. The result, A Visit to Friends, with a libretto by the novelist William Boyd, is the latest, and biggest, surprise Matthews has sprung on us in a decades-long career studded with works of the highest quality.
Boyd’s scenario was elaborated from previously created material partly based on Chekhov’s short story A Visit to Friends, itself the source of The Cherry Orchard. Boyd and Matthews then envisaged a mythical opera discovered in a Moscow archive, libretto supposedly by Chekhov, composer unknown, and it is four scenes of the latter that form the core of A Visit to Friends.
The action alternates between a 21st-century rehearsal room and the imagined staging of the 19th-century Russian opera, adroitly creating the framing device of an opera within an opera.
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The surprise consists in the totally new harmonic language Matthews evolves for his opera, based on the idiom of Scriabin (particularly his Fourth Piano Sonata), contemporaneous with Chekhov. To my ears the benevolent shadow of Mahler is also ever-present, as it has been throughout Matthews’ career. While he has long toyed with a plethora of historical styles, not least in his many felicitous arrangements, Matthews has produced in A Visit to Friends a score of mellifluous melodic inspiration and opulent post-Romantic harmony, albeit with modest orchestral forces: strings, mostly single woodwind, two horns as the only brass, plus harp. Written with consummate skill and grateful on the ear, it’s an opera that should be taken up by any company desirous to prove there’s still life in the genre.
Boyd’s libretto pointedly avoids the poetical touches of the finest librettists of modern opera. Opting instead for a kind of blank verse, which he then ran through software known as Final Draft, used for film scripts, he unsurprisingly came up with an everyday conversational text which works better in the rehearsal studio scenes than in those of the Chekhovian opera where a more heightened mode of expression was too rarely attempted. Matthews is nevertheless able to transform what he was given, by dint of a sensitivity to word-setting worthy of Britten, into pure gold, even if the dramaturgy is too often found wanting.
The score was delivered exquisitely by the Aurora Orchestra under the secure direction of Jessica Cottis. Outstanding among a fine cast was Lotte Betts-Dean, whose gleaming tone irradiated the part of Varia/Vanessa. Rachael Hewer’s production, ingeniously designed by Leanne Vandenbussche, elucidated the complexities of the opera, though the video projections really came into their own only towards the end.
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The day after the premiere of A Visit to Friends, opening the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival, Matthews’ String Quartet No. 6 also received its world premiere in a recital by the excellent Gildas Quartet. This proved a yet further surprise in that it consisted of eight short movements given titles of historical classical forms, mostly dances, such as Waltz-Mazurka, Gigue and Musette. Engaging as the music unfailingly was, you had to listen very carefully to discern the historical underpinning of movements such as the spectral Courante and the darkly introspective Berceuse, so drastically were the stylistic characteristics of the dances disrupted by cross-rhythms and other modernistic devices.
I suspect the whole thing was a big tease by Matthews, but curiously several movements end in mid-flow, as does the opera (for dramatic reasons) and it’s perhaps no coincidence that both were written during the Covid lockdown, when creative artists were needing to reassess the premises of their relationship to audiences.
