David Matthews & Jac van Steen on their musical friendship

Around this time last year, Presto spoke with composer Colin Matthews to mark the 35th anniversary of NMC. A year on, attention turns to another composing Matthews, brother David. His Symphony No. 11, Flute Concerto and Symphonic Diptych from the opera Anna form an attractive album of some of his newest music, released on SOMM Recordings. Presto have time with David and conductor Jac van Steen, who joins flautist Emma Halnan and the Ulster Orchestra on the album.

Both are eager to discuss the music – and David is already recounting their first musical venture. “It was some time in the 1990s, when we recorded In The Dark Time and the Chaconne with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.” What has appealed to Jac about David’s music in the decades since? “There are a few elements – the first of which is the storytelling. The rhetoric of David's music is a very personal thing. It is so natural, the same as with Dvořák, Bruckner or Mahler – though Mahler took more time than David to convince me! The same with Debussy and Ravel, and I could go on, because I think David belongs to that list. The aspect for a conductor of feeling so natural, as though I have a dialogue with a composer and understand completely what they say, is an important element for me. The more I understand music, the more I can send the message across to my audience.”

He continues. “The other aspect, that David mentions to orchestra members, is that he really wants them to enjoy his music – not the physical aspect, but David hopes orchestra members will enjoy playing his music. I take his orchestration as an example for many young composers that I coach. You get scores where composers write about six minutes of music, and the trombone has only one bar to play. I have to explain to them to look at the composers that we mentioned, David included, where the trombones play five of the six minutes and you only notice a bar or two of that six minutes – but that’s a valid bar. For the other bars, they are involved in the musical process. I also admire how every new score that comes to me, written by David, is a different challenge to the previous one. This quality makes me completely happy in reading the score and hearing the score whilst I read it. It is complex but doable, and that is an aspect related to soundscape that I love, all about aesthetics. It should sound good – and while it can be dissonant, or modern, it is always with a relationship to the past, without being conservative. It is traditional for the audience in a way that they feel it is new music of the twenty-first century but based on the rich tradition of our musical history.”

The combination of storytelling while building on established forms of classical music is close to David’s heart. “The symphony has always meant a great deal to me, right from the start. The first piece I wrote was a symphony when I was sixteen, because I'd heard Beethoven's Ninth for the first time and thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever heard. At that point I knew nothing about music, except piano music, and I taught myself how to write for the orchestra. My brother Colin and I helped each other, and we both read scores and started writing orchestral music. The symphony continues to be the most important medium for me, that and the string quartet. I’m now up to twelve symphonies – I’ve just finished the twelfth – though I wrote something like four symphonies before my first, which I discarded. It is the perfect medium for expressing oneself in music. I love the shapes of what you can do, and I often adhere to what might be called the traditional shapes of sonata form, and scherzos, and sometimes combine them into one movement, which is very important for me.”

As it unfolds, the Symphony No. 11 makes references to David’s favourite literary work, J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, with portraits of Lórien and horn calls borne of Rohan. “It so happened that I was reading The Lord of the Rings when I was writing the symphony, and it just got into the piece somehow. There is a Chaconne that builds up to something quite violent, which is an echo of the battle scenes that take place – but it’s not programmatic, it’s more of an atmosphere. The person to whom it is dedicated, my friend R.M. Lamming the novelist, she recognised the spirit which was nice to hear!”

Matthews’s music is notable for its original and inventive orchestration, which he modestly admits is self-taught. “I got it by listening to music and looking at scores obsessively. When my brother and I decided to become composers, I was sixteen and he was thirteen, and we lost interest in school and listened to music. We listened to Radio 3 every evening, and we got particularly interested in Mahler, who is a wonderful model for orchestration. My orchestration doesn’t sound particularly like him, but I learned so much from him and other great composers of the orchestra like Debussy or Richard Strauss.”

What are the challenges for Jac to bring out this orchestration? “It sounds like a cliché,” he says, “but bringing out all the details without forgetting the big line. David writes for people, for human beings – and Mahler is an influence, but if I think of David’s orchestration it brings Elgar to mind. You ask why he writes a low register flute for a long passage, but it is exactly the colour you need at that moment – and that’s what happens with David’s music. I treat it with so much respect, and as David knows I am a very keen proofreader, checking what I should focus on while conducting. They are all small details that make the bigger picture, and it is always the journey that you make with David's music.”

The Flute Concerto is performed on the album by Emma Halnan, who played in Matthews’s Flute Quartet and also 'A Dance For Emma', from Three Woodwind Studies. “She’s a wonderful player”, says David, “and is partly Irish – so the Irishness, which is evident in the folk tune of the last movement, is very suitable for her.” “It was a very special moment when her name came up as soloist”, says van Steen, “because I didn’t know she was on trial for the first flute position in the Ulster Orchestra! It was special that she could be a fantastic first flautist but could present herself with this music in the shiny role of the soloist. We recorded for a few days, and then a month later got the first recording where we could make suggestions. With Emma, the suggestions never stopped! She was so incredibly meticulous, and she knows what she can do.”

The strength of the collaborative spirit between Matthews and van Steen is evident from the latter’s suggestion that David make an orchestral Diptych from his opera Anna, first performed at Grange Park Opera’s 2023 season. “It was a special project”, says van Steen. “David and I have a special relation with the Czech Republic. Anna is a Czech story, and I was eleven years principal guest conductor with Prague Symphony Orchestra in Smetana Hall. I love Prague – it is so beautiful, down to earth and humanly bright. The music itself was symphonically so strong, and I had the feeling that David could step in the footsteps of Korngold or Richard Strauss. It is such good music that I wanted to present it without singers to the audience on a concert-based platform.”

“I didn't know quite how to do it”, admits David, “first of all because the first act in particular is complicated so I had to decide what to leave out. I did eventually produce something which is reasonably coherent”, he says with characteristic understatement. “The second moment represents the second act and was easier. It is mostly a slow movement, a lament, because Anna is going to die at the end, while the first is where she falls passionately in love with the young man Nero. I had to put the vocal lines onto instruments, so I added two extra horns and some trombones, and I replaced the piano with a harp.”

Van Steen sees the opera’s potential for future productions. “If we can present David's operatic work on the concert podium, then it might be a trigger starting with the musical aspect first. I hope this beautiful symphonic music leads to an invitation to put the story on stage in the future. Both David and I have a strong correction connection to Brno, and we would love to bring Anna to the Czech Republic, but I think the UK has so many good stages, and the setting with seven or eight singers and a small chorus and manageable orchestra is very practical.” “It’s the orchestra for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress”, says David, “which was quite big enough to do what I wanted to do.”

Matthews’s connection with the Czech Republic has held firm since the 1980s. “My friend Roger Scruton, who wrote the libretto of Anna, asked me to go to Brno where he was running an underground university. It started with requests from Prague to Oxford for some philosophers, because all their philosophers had been expelled and they were working as street sweepers. The man running the seminars wanted someone to come and talk about Mahler, who was neglected despite being born in eastern Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. Roger asked if I could talk about my own music and Mahler, and we had a seminar lasting seven hours. There were two young composers I met, Pavel Novák and Jaroslav Šťastný. They have both remained close friends, and Pavel has turned into probably the best composer in the Czech Republic. I’ve kept my connections and know a great deal about what went on during the communist period. In the opera, the brother is very sceptical about what will happen, and his sister says it’s a wonderful opportunity to be free, so they are divided.”

Matthews’s music, while recognisably in a British musical language, does indeed have a strong European flavour to it. “Of course the two composers I've been the closest to, Britten and Tippett, were both strongly influenced by European composers – Britten with Shostakovich, and Tippett with Hindemith. They are not purely English, nor Elgar, who came out of Dvořák and Brahms, but somehow, we feel he's very English too. I like the idea of being English, I feel English – and I know I have influences from elsewhere.”

Matthews’s ability to create pictures with his music is matched in art, by the cover of this SOMM release – an unrelated mountain scene that does however complement the music within. “The visual arts have always been incredibly important to me”, he says, “and I’ve continued to do paintings and drawings all my life. My music is often related to paintings, and to the landscapes I see around me”.

Jac van Steen, for his part, has been amassing an impressive discography for SOMM Recordings, the Matthews album complemented by recent releases of orchestral works by Manuel de Falla and Kurt Weill. He holds the orchestra in extremely high esteem. “It's a special orchestra. In David’s music, most of the parts in the orchestra are challenges. If I see the horn group, every player has a challenge, but the British orchestras are so good in meeting that playing aspect, they are able to play what is on the edge of possibility. That is a very great quality, I think.”

His judgement comes from near forty years of experience. “I am not British, but I have lived my whole musical life since 1985 in the UK. It is a beautiful country”, he says with feeling, “and you people have to be careful that that you don't destroy the rich musical culture you have, your landscape, friendliness and intellect. The Ulster Orchestra has been in a shadowy area since before COVID, but now, with Richard Wigley coming in, we could take him to Ulster to build up that orchestra. They can profile themselves among the top players of the UK.”

He is protective of their merits. “It’s a delicate orchestra, a bit vulnerable – if the third flute gets ill, for example, we have to fly in people from England or Scotland, because there are not so many colleagues in Belfast. But Patrick McCarthy, a great director of artistic programmes, he understands. He made it all possible in the combination with SOMM to sit in front of the microphone and get a result. They also have the relationship with BBC Northern Ireland, so for me it was a logical step to introduce more of David's music. The relationship of a conductor and an orchestra is one element, but the relation of a composer and an orchestra is another one. If I play David's music in Belfast, the audience love it, the orchestra love it, and it's a win-win situation!”