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David Matthews’ String Quartet No.16 Premieres at the UK's Beverley Chamber Music Festival

Oct. 11, 2022

On September 29 the Salomé Quartet premiered David Matthews’s String Quartet No.16 at the Beverley Chamber Music Festival in Yorkshire. The concert was followed by a discussion session with Matthews about his life and career, in conversation with Dr. Lucy Walker.

The new work is dedicated to the composer's friend Hugh Wood, a composer who has had a profound influence on David Matthews's life and music, and who passed away in August 2021. Matthews’s complete string quartets have been recorded over several volumes by the Kreutzer Quartet. A Fugue for Hugh for solo piano, another piece dedicated to Wood’s memory, was premiered at the Presteigne Festival by Tim Horton on August 30.

Like his first, third, and fourteenth quartets, String Quartet No. 16 is cast in a single movement comprised of three distinct sections. It draws on a melodic motif from Wood’s string trio Ithaka, his last completed work. The quartet opens with an Andante with an undulating theme on the viola, extended by the violin before a miniature chorale, followed by a more rapid development before the Andante returns. A change of pace and mood comes with an A major scherzo of boisterous triplets; a more serious trio in A minor follows. The concluding section is marked Lento con molto espressione; at its centre is birdsong - a robin notated by Matthews, which was the only bird singing in the winter of 2021 when he composed the piece. The opening Andante returns quietly, before a reprise of the earlier chorale in string harmonics.

October performances of Matthews’s chamber music include Sara Trickey's and Ivana Gavrić's performance of David Matthews’s three-movement Adonis for violin and piano, a work inspired by Greek myth, in a program at the Little Missenden Festival with narration by writer Marina Warner (October 13). Nicholas Daniel and Huw Watkins also give a performance of Matthews’s Oboe Sonata, premiered this summer at the Presteigne Festival, on October 23 at the Free Church in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Listen to David Matthew's Adonis, I. Venus and Adonis (2007):
(David Matthew's Adonis, I. Venus and Adonis/Sara Trickey, violin; Daniel Ton, piano)

To learn more about David Matthews, visit: fabermusic.com.

David Matthews
String Quartet No. 16 (2022)
12'

Adonis (2007)
for violin and piano
12'

Oboe Sonata (2020-22)
for oboe/cor anglais
20'

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