The composer Colin Matthews celebrates his 70th birthday this year, an occasion which is marked by a new film from Barrie Gavin that’s screening at the Aldeburgh festival next week.
Matthews’s place at the centre of the UK’s contemporary musical life is assured thanks to his musical relationship with Benjamin Britten in the early 1970s, his invaluable work in preparing a performing edition of Mahler’s 10th Symphony, his founding of the NMC record label, that crucial champion of new British music, the generations of young composers he has mentored at Aldeburgh, and as part of the London Symphony Orchestra’s Panufnik Scheme - and much, much more.
But what’s most important, of course, is Matthews’s huge catalogue of works: solo, chamber and vocal music, but above all, a vast corpus of large-ensemble and orchestral compositions, where Matthews’s musical imagination is at its freest and most ambitious.
We have an exclusive clip from Gavin’s film, in which Matthews’s fellow composers and friends – Mark-Anthony Turnage, Oliver Knussen, John Adams, the violinist Leila Josefowicz, and broadcaster Sara Mohr-Pietsch amongst them - pay tribute to his music’s teeming creative energy.
John Adams:
One of the things that drew me to Colin’s music was his ability to be very soft and very tender and very delicate and then also be rude and boorish at the same time... I love that it’s very British, and yet at the same time it has this luminosity and delicacy, and the sense of inner cohesion that you get with the great French masters.
Leila Josefowitz:
There’s something very stoic in him and I think in the writing [of the Violin Concerto]. ....[His music] is a mix of very strong, intense, internal emotion and very outward, agitated activity.
Turnage and Knussen also hint at the unique expressive quality of Matthews’s works: they are “dark in colour”, according to Knussen, and Turnage talks about something “sinister … a violent quality” that lies underneath much of his music. That’s true, yet Matthews’s music contains a seductive and opulent darkness, as you can hear in excerpts from Suns Dance and Turning Point in the clip.
Matthews’s many achievements as an ambassador for new musical culture are recognised by anyone who works in contemporary music. But his still more impressive work as a composer is his vital, ongoing legacy that will surely be more feted in the future.
•Barrie Gavin’s film portrait of Colin Matthews: Who Knows, You Can Do It is at Aldeburgh cinema at 11am on 20 June.
