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Colin Matthews

Composer

Raucous, modern, tone-crunching … aggressive, in-your-face music.

— Lawrence A. Johnson, Sun-Sentinel

Renewal (1991-6). Chorus & Orchestra

Intrada
Threnody
Broken Symmetry
Metamorphosis

Renewal owes its origins to a remark I made at the pre-concert talk for the first performance, in the spring of 1992, of what has now become its third part.  I said then that I had thought of Broken Symmetry as perhaps the scherzo of a ‘mega-work’.  After its second performance at the Proms, Nicholas Kenyon reminded me of what I had said, and asked me when I was going to write the rest of it.  Although I hadn’t really thought through the implications of writing something on such a large scale, the idea of doing something gradually grew, and the prospect of composing a work to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BBC’s Third Programme made it concrete.

The opening Intrada, a 70th birthday present for Hans Werner Henze, is scored for wind, brass, and percussion: its musical material is closely related to Broken Symmetry, although unlike that work it is mostly slow and brooding. For the framework of the second part, a Threnody dedicated to the memory of Toru Takemitsu, who died while I was writing it, I turned to another pre-existing piece, Memorial, composed for the London Symphony Orchestra in 1992.  But I only used the opening section of that work, for strings, piano and harp, and the music develops in a different direction from its original.  The final part, Metamorphoses, for chorus and orchestra, sets a text derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, describing the philosophy of Pythagoras: ‘Nothing in the whole world endures unchanged…everything is renewed’. From this comes the title of the whole work.

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27 April, 2021 - Seascapes (World Premiere)
Nash Ensemble
Wigmore Hall, London

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Useful Links

Faber Music
NMC Recordings
The Holst Foundation

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