This disc committed to chamber music of Colin Matthews is an entry in NMC's Ancora series, a worthy venture devoted to bringing back into print recordings of contemporary music by British composers that have been deleted. Some of these pieces go back to the LP era, and even had to be transferred from vinyl as the original masters have gone astray. Divertimento for double string quartet (1982) is a signature piece from Matthews and unique in his output, being an extrapolation from some of the harmonic material in Richard ...
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This disc committed to chamber music of Colin Matthews is an entry in NMC's Ancora series, a worthy venture devoted to bringing back into print recordings of contemporary music by British composers that have been deleted. Some of these pieces go back to the LP era, and even had to be transferred from vinyl as the original masters have gone astray. Divertimento for double string quartet (1982) is a signature piece from Matthews and unique in his output, being an extrapolation from some of the harmonic material in Richard Strauss' Metamorphosis rendered in Matthews' own style. It is a fascinating, tense, and dramatic work, as lush, familiar romantic gestures yield the floor to more agitated, dissonant material and back again in three seamless, fluid movements. A sense of the romantic also pervades the Oboe Quartet No. 1 (1981), written as a commission to celebrate the centenary of Nottingham University; although the harmonic language is more stringent than in the Divertimento, it maintains the same sense...
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