England's Toccata Classics label has issued several albums devoted to contemporary composer David Matthews, and this one makes a fine starting place if you're curious. Those perusing the graphics will find comparisons with Beethoven, Bartók, Britten, Michael Tippett, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, and, if you delve a bit deeper, Schoenberg and Mahler. It sounds preposterous to say that these influences could be combined, but that's where the appeal of this music lies. The three piano trios, from 1983, 1993, and 2005, match ...
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England's Toccata Classics label has issued several albums devoted to contemporary composer David Matthews, and this one makes a fine starting place if you're curious. Those perusing the graphics will find comparisons with Beethoven, Bartók, Britten, Michael Tippett, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, and, if you delve a bit deeper, Schoenberg and Mahler. It sounds preposterous to say that these influences could be combined, but that's where the appeal of this music lies. The three piano trios, from 1983, 1993, and 2005, match their traditionalist medium with clear sonata forms and generally tonal orientation. Yet the music is not neoclassic in effect. Broadly, you'll hear vernacular rhythms that remind one of Bartók; the rigorous polyphony of Tippett; the well-made, direct appeal of Britten; big tunes -- good ones -- that alternately bring to mind Shostakovich or Vaughan Williams; deep chromatic harmony that seems at times to hark back directly to early Schoenberg; and, in the languorously transcendent...
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