Who is Colin Matthews? Certainly not an English pastoralist...
Some years ago, Colin Matthews – a lifelong Londoner – bought himself a composing retreat on the Somerset/Dorset borders and half-seriously confessed to fears that the view of cows from his windows ‘might turn me into an English Pastoral composer before my time’.
He needn’t have worried. It didn’t. And though he’s about to mark his 80th birthday with a new Oboe Concerto – the mere thought of which triggers associations with Vaughan Williams, Finzi and blue-remembered hills – he tells me it won’t be anything of the sort. Written for London Symphony Orchestra principal oboist Olivier Stankiewicz, it’s going to be ‘spiky, quite forceful, not noticeably English at all’. So there.
But looking back on his career, as happens when someone hits 80, you might ask: if Colin Matthews isn’t English Pastoral, what is he? And there’s no easy answer. Like most British composers of today, he resists definition – perhaps because, as he says, ‘We don’t have the shared aesthetic you’re expected to have if you’re a composer in Italy or France. We’re magpies, picking from wherever we can. And I don’t think anything I write stands out as English. If anything, the background is mainstream European: Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, that sort of world, though I’m not sure how I fit into it. Slightly left of centre, I suppose. Sometimes I’m relatively tonal, but it’s not my natural language.’
Colin Matthews... at the heart of British musical life for 50 years
One clear thing is that, wherever he fits in, Matthews has flourished at the heart of British musical life for more than half a century. Which, if nothing else, makes him a survivor. Many of the star composers from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s have gone quiet. But Matthews is still in business – writing major new works like the opera and string quartet premiered at last year’s Aldeburgh Festival; encouraging young composers through the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme and the LSO’s Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme; promoting British music on the NMC record label he set up three decades ago; sitting on committees (PRS for Music, the Holst Foundation), and generally functioning as one of the musical world’s key mover/shakers.
Colin and David Matthews... composing brothers
In fact, it’s tempting to think of him as a collaborative figure, in contrast to the lonely-garret idea of the way composers function. And the habit of working with others started early on – growing up with an older brother, David, who would also turn out to be a composer.
Some years ago, an unreliable dictionary of contemporary music lumped the Matthews brothers together in the same entry on the grounds that ‘musicians have understandable difficulty in telling them apart’. And it was an absurd thing to say because their sound worlds are quite different – David’s being (as Colin puts it) ‘right of centre’, tending toward English Romanticism and conventional tonality.
But they did, nonetheless, grow up side-by-side with common interests and shared career paths. Home was Leytonstone in north east London where, says Colin, ‘neither of us had a proper musical education beyond piano lessons, although David did a bit of performing – which I’ve never done – and had natural gifts I didn’t have. I struggled. But we were close, living in each other’s pockets, and we both read Classics at Nottingham University. Then I went on to do an MA in composition, despite having no music qualification beyond Grade 1 piano. I sometimes feel a bit of an imposter because I have so few credentials. I never went to a conservatoire. And though I studied a bit with Nicholas Maw, I didn’t spend much time with him.’
Colin Matthews... working for Benjamin Britten
Nonetheless, he did eventually obtain a doctorate from Sussex University. And he had gall, writing to the musicologist Deryck Cooke to point out ‘a few mistakes’ in Cooke’s now-legendary efforts to complete Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. ‘It was presumptuous of me, but meant I ended up assisting him - with David coming on board as well – for the next ten years or so, going through the score in minute detail to make it publishable.'
The next thing the brothers did together – and it’s a mark of how they aimed high – was to work for Benjamin Britten, who needed assistants to turn his manuscripts into finished scores. ‘David started off with The Burning Fiery Furnace. I got involved with Owen Wingrave. And then came Death in Venice, which was a rescue operation because the job had originally gone to Graham Johnston but things didn’t work out between them. Britten wasn’t easy as a person, but we got on quite well – largely, I suspect, because I was aware of his stature without being in awe of him as many were. There was a certain detachment in our relationship. We didn’t have heart-to-hearts: there was work to do. And I ended up seeing the full score through to publication, several years after his death in 1976.’
Colin Matthews... reviving and completing incomplete works
What’s more, this professional, non-devotional relationship eventually extended into one of Matthews’s specialities: retrieving works that Britten had discarded or left incomplete to make them viable. You could argue that the end results are music Britten didn’t want the world to hear; and Matthews’s sensitivity to criticism is clear from an essay he once wrote about the morality of rifling through composers’ bottom drawers, called ‘Going Behind Britten’s Back’.
But he defends his rifling. ‘Britten hoarded every sketch he made: he wouldn’t have done that if he expected it all to be thrown away. And when people say it’s scraping the barrel, they don’t know how big the barrel is. His official Opus 1 is actually number 680 or something in the complete catalogue of works – the amount of juvenilia and abandoned pieces is vast. Though much of it is of no consequence, to have dug out the Temporal Variations or the Clarinet Concerto he intended for Benny Goodman is worthwhile.’
An allied Matthews pastime has been an interest in taking scores by dead composers and adapting them: mostly by enlargement (orchestrating Mahler’s songs or Debussy’s Preludes) but occasionally by reduction (turning Beethoven symphonies into piano trios). Famously he enlarged Holst’s The Planets with an extra movement for the omitted Pluto – attracting worldwide attention, although interest diminished when scientists inconveniently decided that Pluto wasn’t a planet after all.
‘Most of these projects didn’t start with me; I was asked to do them. And when you’re asked by Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma to turn Beethoven’s Fifth into a piano trio, you don’t say no. For artists of that calibre, I’d rewrite the 1812 Overture. But I enjoy this kind of thing because generally you don’t have to worry where the notes are coming from. It’s a lot easier.’
Colin Matthews... on writing original music
As for the tough stuff – original scores – Matthews’s output from the mid-1970s to date has come loaded with significant, substantial works that keep their place in the repertoire and manage the feat of being individually distinctive but collectively coherent. Most of them have been orchestral. With notable exceptions like the grandly conceived 1980s song cycle The Great Journey, there aren’t so many vocal works – an avoidance maybe prompted by escape from the shadow of Britten, although Matthews isn’t sure about that. And his orchestral writing – often forceful, energised, with carefully planned structures that support fast-moving, single-movement formats – has been compared to the heavy engineering of Isambard Kingdom Brunel: an analogy to which, he says, ‘I don’t object.’
Structure is a top priority in composition – not that he expects an average listener to register what’s going on, but it matters. ‘Harry Birtwistle used to say music is like architecture: if you build it badly it falls down. I’ve always been guided by that. Whether you understand it or not, good structure is there to make the piece deliver impact. If it doesn’t do that, there’s no point.’
'I wouldn't call my music intellectual, but thoughtful, yes'
Something else that matters is to make the listener think: ‘I wouldn’t call my music intellectual,’ he says, ‘but thoughtful, yes.’ And the requirement for thought perhaps explains the absence, among otherwise alluring works, of something you could call a crowd-pleaser: the equivalent of Peter Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise or John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine that provides a comfortable pension. You don’t find Matthews turning up with frequency on Classic FM playlists; or even, these days, on BBC Radio 3. ‘I know,’ he says with a sigh. ‘Things have moved on. I consider myself lucky to get the commissions I do.’
Which brings us back to the decidedly Not English Pastoral Oboe Concerto, commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra for his 80th birthday (premiered at the Barbican on 8 February). He’s had a long relationship with the LSO, spending most of the 1990s as its associate composer and producing a varied list of works for its players, from the tough, brutalist Quatrain to the fanciful, escapist Machines and Dreams. He’s also worked before with Stankiewicz, and written chamber music for the oboe. So, he’s on familiar ground here. And for someone who values relationships, familiarity is good.
‘It’s important to know who you’re writing for,’ he says. ‘And with the LSO, as with all the ensembles I’m close to – the Hallé, Nash Ensemble, London Sinfonietta – I enjoy the feeling of being an insider rather than some distant figure who turns up with a score… I don’t believe in ivory towers. That way lies danger.’
