Works for solo violin and viola. Exploring a long-term collaboration with David Matthews

Collaboration is at the heart of my work. Central to this are a number of long-term partnerships with composers. Each of these is different, and naturally, the characters of the cooperative work, the various shared workbenches, both real and figurative, affects the nature of the musical outcomes (both in terms of score, performance and recording). Exploring the warp and weft of these creative friendships, over time, illuminates and is illuminated by my work on older musics, and the creative processes and collaborative work of the earlier composers that fascinate me, particularly Beethoven, Tartini, Alban Berg, Telemann (the list goes on) …

I have worked with the great English composer, David Matthews, since my early 20s. Initially, our collaboration was centred on his work with my Kreutzer Quartet (which will be dealt with on another posting). However, from 1993, we began an intensive exploration of the possibilities of the violin (and viola) alone (which was becoming central to my work). Since then, he has written more me more that forty solo works, which I play worldwide. This is alongside our collaboration on chamber music – my Kreutzer Quartet is just about to release volume 7 of his quartets, and will be premiering his 18^th Quartet this year.  Naturally there is considerable overlap between this work. We have also worked together as writers ( I commissioned and edited his critically acclaimed biography of Benjamin Britten {Haus Publications}).

Research Questions.

Collaboration is at the heart of my work with Matthews: each of the new works that he has written for is the result and exposition of the diverse outcomes of our exploration of what it means to work together in the very long and short term. David’s new works for me build on the technical and aesthetic innovations and exploration that have always been part of our work. In the third and latest volume of solo works the collaborative process is evidenced in a number of areas. This includes:

1. Extended ‘traditional’ virtuosity – most obvious in the transfer of late Romantic pianism back to solo violin – to be heard in theFantasy after Rachmaninov
2. Refinement of colour, particularly in the delicate evocations of ‘Arctic Suite.’ This was a new step, as the first work for viola that David has written specifically for me. The impact of a very particular instrument – the 1641 Rayman viola, was key.

New spaces: extended exploration, together, of what the instrument can do, offers the imaginative and conceptual space to try things that are not possible on more ‘occasional’ collaborations.I take everything David writes (be it musical birthday-greeting, or large-scale work) equally seriously. The Three Birthday Variations had just such a genesis.

Along with the exploration of new works, our work involves rediscovery/revaluation of older, unplayed works (and in one case thought lost). The Fantasy for solo viola dates to the very beginning of Matthews’ compositional life: the experience of playing and developing the more recent works has a profound impact on the works such as this, which predate intense collaboration. The resulting performance edition, and performances/recordings explore this dangerous ground.

Building a repertoire:  The pieces stretch from new works written for me, and David’s earliest work for viola, dating from his mid-twenties: I am at the centre of a (non-string playing) living composer developing one of the most substantial bodies of work for my instrument alone. This recording is a vital part in documenting this evolving canon. The practical (technical and editorial) work which went into this endeavour entailed, fascinating aesthetic and ethical overlaps, where composer and performer explore the sometimes-irreconcilable balance between a living composer’s current predilections and earlier priorities.

This disc includes two variants of the possibilities of paraphrase and transcription for violin alone: Dancing Shiva is a reworking string orchestra, Shiva Dances. The ‘slimmed down’ instrumentation allowed the composer to reach back to the source material for the work. His Fantasia on Rachmaninov's Prelude in G Minor, Op.147 is a virtuoso paraphrase – to some extent sending the original back to the 19th century Paganini/Liszt tradition which inspired the original. 

Naturally, the music is the primary outcome of this work, and there’s a lot in common between the ideas and workshopping that go into the evolution and appearances of new works (and the reevaluation of earlier ones) and the reflective process integral to research. I would say that it is impossible to separate these.

From 2013, I started documenting and sharing, this shared work, on a series of volumes on the UK’s, ‘Toccata Classics’ label. The result is the following (3 issues over 12 Years):

Volume 1. https://toccataclassics.com/product/matthews-solo-violin-music-1/

Volume 2. https://toccataclassics.com/product/david-matthews-solo-violin-volume-two/

Volume 3. https://toccataclassics.com/product/david-matthews-music-for-solo-violin-and-viola-volume-three/

Earlier issues including Matthews’ solo works include;

https://divineartrecords.com/recording/etude-philharmonique/

Fishear – Winter Journey – Release 1995 (no longer available)

The range of works on the cycle of discs reflects my interest in the overlap between works written for/with me, and pieces dedicated to other artists (these mainly predate my work with Matthews). In the case of some of the earliest pieces, written in the 1970s, this work involved reviving pieces which had never been played. The practical and editorial work which went into this endeavour entailed, as it often does, fascinating aesthetic and ethical overlaps, where composer and performer discus (and sometimes disagree!) about the sometimes irreconcilable balance between a living composer’s current predilections and earlier priorities. For any performer engaging seriously, longterm, with a composer across the broad sweep of their output, these questions are always challenging: other composers with whom I have had the opportunity to engage in this area have been Hans Werner Henze, George Rochberg, Gloria Coates, and earlier in my career Michael Tippett.

An extra dimension to the work has been added by Matthews’ leaning towards musical portraiture. As an Elgarian, it is clear that the Enigma Variations had a impact on his practice, but, in my experience, he takes this to lengths only openly matched by thee overt portraiture of Virgil Thomson. In my experience, the practice first started to fascinate me with the composition of his 15 Fugues from 1998-2003, each of which was dedicated to a friend or colleague. The subsequent 15 Preludes (2007-2014), continued the practice, as have ensuing groups of miniatures. In every case, the limning of a musical portrait ranges from depictions of  subjects’ characters and characteristics, through to their enthusiasm and interests.

Along with portraiture, Matthews’ work has increasingly tended the depictive. This includes landscape – such as his Arctic Suite for Viola (2024), reflecting on the impact of the environment of Northern Norway. And his lifelong passion of ornithology can be felt in a  number of works written for me, which document and reflect on the song, behaviour and environments of birds from Australia to Europe.

Throughout this decades-long process, David and I have both reflected on and written about our work together. This, naturally, was part of the recording process, included in the extensive booklets which are possible with Toccata Classics. In addition, I have written about our collaboration on www.peter-sheppard-skaerved.com, which includes numerous blog posts about the works, which are widely accessed. This offers access to much of the manuscript materials (which David often gives to me), sketches and technical solutions.

We take a very collaborative approach to recording: I produce and edit all of the recordings, and the composers is not only at the sessions, but sits with me in the studio. This offers an exciting opportunity to treat the recording itself as a workshop, part of the ongoing development, and often the compositional process of the piece. This is reflected in my practice of posting timely outtakes on www.youtube.com/@PeterSheppardSkaervedviolin , which to  date includes 70 short films dedicated to my work with Matthews. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa6jLsEuw6UlSGG79Sr0iW-U_UHedC1rc&si=AyI_qwQKGTim0Sx-

This work also has published outcomes, as the complex technical challenges posed by much of (particularly contrapuntal) the work that David has developed for and with me have necessitated editorial work and technical clarifications for the resulting publications for Faber Music.

Here are the programme notes for the discs – essays by the compose and myself:

Nota Bene: the bold square-bracketed numbers refer to the track numbers on the discs, for easy reference.

Disc Three – Released November 2025

A PERSONAL VIEW OF DAVID MATTHEWS’ WORKS FOR SOLO VIOLIN AND VIOLA

by Peter Sheppard Skærved

After a recent performance in New College Chapel, Oxford, an older gentleman came up to me with a stack of CDs, brandishing a pen:

‘I hope that you won’t mind,’ he said, ‘and I know that it’s pretty nerdy, but I collect CDs – would you sign these?’.

 On the top of the pile was a disc that I made thirty-odd years ago (not actually my first solo disc,  but my fourth): first recordings of solo works by Erwin Schulhoff and André Jolivet rub shoulders with my collaborating composers, Nigel Clarke, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Sculthorpe, Dmitri Smirnov and David Matthews – his Winter Journey provided the title for this disc.^[1] That piece was the first of his solo works which I played. It remains central to my repertoire, and, in the 32 years since learning it, David’s extraordinary vision of the violin became touchstone to my own relationship to the instrument. My understanding of my instrument is, literally, in the hands of all the composers, and especially those to whom I return most often. Telemann, Tartini, … David Matthews. They have had the most substantial impact on the way that I play.

I am fascinated by David’s approach to other composers, his acknowledgement of their importance for his own music. Over the years, we have spoken many times about his love of arranging, and he often has told me that it is difficult for him to delineate between the act of arranging the music of others and composing his own. Of course, his music is always immediately recognisable. Collaborating with him on arrangements, of Beethoven, Skryabin, Bach, Elgar (and more), has made it evident to me that he is as diligent about that process as working on his own compositions. It is a fascinating overlap of practices, complicated and enhanced by his habit of reconfiguring his own works (an example of which finishes this new programme).

David’s creative devotion to fellow-composers includes various models of transcription, paraphrase and variation. The latter form is, at least on the surface, the most classical, or that might be how it seems. As he notes, the last of his Three Birthday Pieces, Op. 167 [10] ‘is based on the tenth of Beethoven’s Eleven Bagatelles, Op. 119’. It is a ‘traditional’ set of variations, reaching back to the origin of the conceit: ‘divisions’, which in the early Baroque involved increasing the amount of material between melodic pitches, ‘dividing’. But there is another layer, a subtle typology to David’s variations: he has also arranged Beethoven’s Op. 119 Bagatelles for string quartet, which my Kreutzer Quartet premiered, plays and has recorded.^[2] So, his return to the tiny tenth bagatelle (which is the hardest to play for a four-person ensemble!), has the added ‘resonance’, both for composer and violinist,  that he is ‘re-inhabiting’ a space in which we have both already established residence!

A feeling of ‘shared space’ marks out the fourth of his Fantasias, Op. 147 [13]. As David notes, it is dedicated to Edward Clark, an enthusiastic advocate for Sibelius for many years. Nearly all the material in the piece is from Sibelius symphonies, and I have a suspicion that its strict ordering is an affectionate hat-tip to Edward’s devotion to the arc of Sibelius’ output. But this ‘Sibeliad’ also reminds me of what I owe Edward. My devotion to David’s music was initiated and encouraged by Edward: at the beginning of my work with the Kreutzer Quartet, Edward encouraged us to play all the Sibelius string quartets, and the piano quintet – and to programme them alongside David’s quartets. Indeed, an early Kreutzer Quartet programme which Edward’s ‘Sibelius Society’ presented at the Wigmore Hall reflects the shared enthusiasms I am articulating here: it consisted of David Matthews’ Fourth Quartet, Op. 27, Sibelius’ D minor Voces Intimae, Op. 56, and Beethoven’s C sharp minor, Op 132.

David’s ‘Fantasia on Rachmaninov’s Prelude in G minor’ [14] starts out as a direct transcription. David retained the key of the original (something which, for instance, Liszt did not do with all his reworkings of Paganini Capricci). Rachmaninov’s chosen key and note choices make the famous opening ideal for the violin (indeed, ‘straight’ violin transcriptions begin with almost identical chord choices). However, the fun starts when David cannot resist composing, fantasising. As a non-pianist, I have no skin in such a game, or rather, I don’t when it comes to Rachmaninov (I can, and do, edge my way through Beethoven bagatelles when no one is listening), and so this ‘Fantasia’ was my very first opportunity to play any Rachmaninov – I have never been an orchestral player, and have not performed his two piano trios. Thus the piece has become my Rachmaninov, and David’s fantastical excursions just as much part of that as the original material, as if I were simply the composer improvising, if on the wrong instrument.

Like nearly every composer before him, David finds ways to reconfigure, repurpose his own works. The outcomes can be small-scale: his Three Fugues, Op. 88a (2001–02) for piano, are transcriptions of three of Fifteen Fugues, Op. 88, for solo violin, written for me.^[3] As he notes, one of the movements of his Arctic Suite [7] was originally for solo cello. But he also reduces, boils down, larger works. Dancing Shiva [16] reworks his Shiva Dances for orchestra, and as he notes, he embraced the manifold limitations of the single violin, to evoke something of the sitar solos which had inspired the original piece.

All David’s vary-ing and fantasy-ing constantly reminds me that, to varying degrees, every composer, every artist, every writer carries on constant dialogue with the voices of the past, singing and speaking, using their voices and cadences, though evolved, just as they had done before. The great Neoteric poet of late Republican Rome, Gaius Valerius Catullus, was also the greatest thief – his acclaimed ‘Ille mi par esse deo videtur’^[4], is Sappho’s ‘φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν’,^[5] though completed. Bach’s A minor Concerto, bwv1065, is Vivaldi’s B minor Concerto, Op. 3, No. 10, but with four harpsichords, not four solo violins, and with the concertante cello part subsumed into the keyboards.

In David Matthews’s music, the nature of influence can be both overt, as noted above, but can also be obscure, and I have always had a sense that the complexities extend into his dedications. Most of his smaller solo works are dedicated to friends and colleagues. Some use, or vary, musical material from those friends (his Sixteenth String Quartet, Op. 161 (2021),^[6] is constructed around, enshrines, a fragment of music by Hugh Wood, whom the piece memorialises). The second of Three Birthday Variations [9] uses a theme by its dedicatee, Robin Walker (again, as that a was a cello piece, it affords me the chance to play music not otherwise available to my violin). And David is not averse to imitating the style, or emotional content, of a composer to whom he pays homage: ‘Brno Fantasia’ [12] feels very much like playing the music of Pavel Zemek Novák (he has written extensively for me). One might argue that David’s determination to write decidedly ‘un-Skempton-like’ music when he created the ‘Capriccio-Fantasia’ recorded here [11] is also an affectionate form of such imitation, carving sound from material that his fellow composer would not use, not unlike one of Rachel Whiteread’s moulds of interiors, or the spaces around objects. There is an extraordinary sensitivity at work here.

The next step towards the dedicatee is the use of his or her name, as is the case with John Carewe in the first of the variation sets here [8]. The essence of such miniature-crafting is portraiture. Portraits have at any given time veered between the celebration of (put broadly) subjects’ attributes, environments, enthusiasm and characters. That is assuredly the case with David’s work, and I certainly feel John’s irrepressible verve and fervour on the podium when I play the piece (I first led an orchestra under him when I was eighteen years old).

Sometimes, however, where the dedicatee is an artist, elements of his or her work may secret themselves in the composer’s creative imagination. I had a powerful sense, when I first played ‘Midwinter Song’ [15], that it reminded me of something. The piece is dedicated to the novelist R. M. Lamming, whose The Notebook of Gismondo Cavalleti is set in the Florence of da Vinci and Buonarotti, a book David has read and loves. Playing the piece sent my imagination directly to the first chapter of that book, which describes an unusual Florentine winter:

In piazzas, gardens and courtyards, the statues were transformed. Snow veiled their shoulders, their limbs were thickened and altered, the shields and spears they held were turned into shapes with mysterious meanings, and as for their faces, modified by the snow that clung were a lip curled or a nostril dilated, they no longer seemed serene nor familiar to us. We saw them as if for the first time.^[7]

I am not sure what David’s answer will be when I ask him about such an instinctual, personal link. But for me such a depiction of an artist’s work, was unavoidable.

When David told my wife and me that he and his wife, the artist Jenifer Wakelyn, were planning to travel to the Far North, by ship, in the winter, we responded enthusiastically, talking about the wonders of Tromsø in the snow, Norwegian fjell rising sheer from the water and the Northern Lights. A few months later, I found myself premiering his resulting Arctic Suite on a warm summer afternoon in a sleepy Oxfordshire village hall. I and my wife enjoyed another type of recognition, that Jenifer and David had seen and loved the same things we do at the Arctic Circle, and here I was singing about it. The collaboration between composer and performer is personal, evoking shared stories.

As David notes, he has written more music for solo violin that perhaps any other living composer. From the very start he experimented with longer single movements for solo string instruments: the viola Fantasia, Op. 5, No. 1 (1970) [1], is ten minutes long, and Winter Journey takes quarter of an hour. It was no surprise, then, when David showed me the score of Dancing Shiva to find it was a fifteen-minute single movement. After an early performance, in Sandwich Guildhall, my colleague and friend, the cellist Neil Heyde noted, ‘It just keeps going, there’s more and more’. Strangely, a glance at the score will not give any indication of quite how overwhelming the piece can be, for both performer and listener: the manifestation of Shiva that David refers to is ‘Nataraja’, cosmic dancer of life and destruction. The effect of the music on the player reflects this power: its performance is exhausting.

David showed me a ‘Nataraja Shiva’ sculpture that he had bought while he was writing the piece. It was an interesting moment, as I told him, that at home, I am always close to a beautiful small ‘Padmasana [sitting] Shiva’’ an exquisite antique bronze figure given to me by a girlfriend when I was in my teens. My Shiva is in ‘Lotus’ position, important to me, as yoga is part of my ‘daily bread’. Somehow, David had written a piece which counterpointed my practice, things around me daily. It felt the closest that David has come to writing me a piece, which might be about me, who I am, even if by accident.

David’s awe-inspiring dance of Shiva resolves into transfigured tranquillity. His poetic exploration reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s response to the ‘Nataraja.’ Both poet and composer reach for the ‘Still point of the turning world’:

Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.^[8]

Disc Two– Released 2017

THE CHALLENGE OF THE VIOLIN

by David Matthews

Although to my regret I don’t play the violin, I have written more pieces for it than for any other instrument. At the last count, there are two concertos (plus a double concerto for violin and viola), three concertinos, seven pieces for violin and piano, two sets of violin duos and 46 pieces for solo violin (some of which have been collected into sequences, such as the Fifteen Fugues and Fifteen Preludes). Since 1998 I have been writing a succession of solo pieces for Peter Sheppard Skaerved; they have become a regular part of my life, a kind of extension to my journal. Peter is such a splendid, superbly erudite and sympathetic musician, a wonderful collaborator, usually performing each new piece a short time after he has received it (on one occasion, three days after I’d written a piece on the summit of an Italian mountain – it is now Prelude No. 5 [X]). Peter also relishes a challenge: when I was writing the Fifteen Fugues I often thought ‘he won’t be able to play that, surely’ – but he has always found a way. This second album of my solo-violin music, which contains everything else that wasn’t in the first album,^[9] gives an extraordinary insight into his understanding of my violin music.

Fantasia on Paganini’s Second Violin Concerto, Op. 147, No. 1

In 2006 Peter asked me to write a cadenza to the first movement of Paganini’s Second Violin Concerto for a pupil of his, Pedro Mereiles. I composed a very difficult cadenza incorporating some of Paganini’s ‘tricks’: for example, a descending tremolo chromatic scale in thirds on harmonics. The following year, Peter suggested I include the cadenza in a paraphrase [X] of the first movement of the Concerto, which he premiered on 18 October 2007 on Paganini’s Guarnerius violin ‘Il Cannone’ at a memorable concert at the Palazzo Tursi in Genoa, where it is kept on display in a bullet-proof case. In the first part of the Fantasia, as I called it, the violin is muted, and Peter played it with his back to the audience, turning to face them when he took the mute off and played the cadenza.

 Listening to the piece again while this recording was being edited, I decided it deserved an opus number, and am now planning to add to it a few more virtuoso pieces.

Three Chants, Op. 138

Three Chants began in 1997 with the first piece, written originally for viola with the player humming as well as playing the instrument [X]. In 2009 I revised it in an arrangement for violin, and added two more pieces, the second [X] with the player singing ‘Ah’, the third [X] with whistling. In 2015 I revised the third piece, to make it more practical for performers.

Four Australian Birds, Op. 84a

These pieces began on a visit to Australia in September 2000. While staying near Canberra with my friends Stephanie Burns and John McDonald, I wrote down the song of their resident magpie, which they had named Munro. Australian magpies, unlike their British counterparts, have melodious, often diatonic songs, and Munro’s was outstanding. When a few weeks later I was staying with some other friends, Michael Hannan and Sue Boardman, at Nimbin in northern New South Wales, I noted down three more songs, two of them distinctively melodic. The Koel, an Australian cuckoo, sings a third like the European cuckoo, but rising instead of falling – in other words upside-down, as one might expect from an Australian bird! Koels usually begin with a minor third, rising to the major, then a fourth and sometimes higher. The Pied Butcherbird sings three notes, typically a falling major second followed, most unusually, by a rising augmented fourth. Lastly, the Eastern Whipbird has a crescendoing high note followed by a whip-crack - an extraordinary sound.

 All four birdsongs appear in the first piece, ‘Munro's Song’[X], which later became the basis of the first movement of my Tenth String Quartet.^[10] The second piece, ‘The Two Cuckoos’ [X], juxtaposes the Koel with the European cuckoo, and was originally written for recorder for a concert celebrating Wilfrid Mellers’ 90th birthday in 2004, where it was played by John Turner. Wilfrid loved Australia and Beethoven, so there is an appropriate quotation from the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. ‘Whipbird in the Rainforest’ [X] is an evocation of the bird’s typical habitat. It was written as a present for the 40th birthday of my composer friend Matthew Taylor. Lastly, ‘The Butcher Bird’ [X] was composed for the 60th birthday of my dear friend and publisher at Faber Music, Sally Cavender. Its initial four notes, the first three of which are the song I heard, are coincidentally a quotation from Messiaen’s Quatuor pour le fin du temps, and can stand as a tribute to a composer I love, even if I find his own use of birdsong a bit too pedantic.

Sonata for solo violin, Op. 8

My first piece for solo violin was composed in 1974–75 for Joseph Segal, with the title of ‘Sonatina’. My partner at that time, Vivien Southon, worked at the Bodleian Library as a manuscript conservator, where her colleague was Joseph Segal’s wife. What I didn’t know then was that Segal had been a pupil of Adolf Busch, and something of a young prodigy. His later career had been curtailed by an accident, and sadly he was never able to play my piece. I put it to one side until, in 2015, Peter happened to find a copy of the score in a second-hand shop and told me he wanted to play it. I looked at my score and decided it needed some revisions, but they weren’t substantial, and I renamed it ‘Sonata’.

 There are four movements, the first a short prelude [X], the second [X] a very fast scherzo. In the third [X], the long main theme is repeated twice, each time more elaborately. I re-used this theme as the opening idea of my Fifth String Quartet.^[11] The finale is in variation form, and ends in an assertive D major.

The next five pieces are short occasional works, not intended as a group. I wrote the arrangement of the National Anthem [X] for Peter in 2007, my second arrangement of this versatile tune; the first one, in contrast, was written for the orchestra of Janáček’s Sinfonietta, with twelve trumpets and three tubas. The tiny Song Thrush Fragment [X] was written in 2004 for Peter to play at an art exhibition in Mexico. The notes came from the Song Thrush at that time that I could hear from my house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Birthday Piece for Richard [X] dates from 2012 and was composed for the 60th birthday of the photographer Richard Bram. An Album Leaf for Sally was a 65th-birthday present for Sally Cavender. Not Farewell [X] was originally written in 2003 for viola, for Martin Kingsbury (an amateur violist) when he took semi-retirement from Faber Music – hence the title. I transposed it up a fifth for violin and changed a few notes from the original, which remains as it was.

Fifteen Preludes for solo violin, Op. 132

Between 1998 and 2002 I wrote for Peter a series of fifteen fugues in the most practical keys for the violin.^[12] In 2012 I decided to compose fifteen companion preludes in the same keys. These preludes can be performed together with the fugues (so far they have not), but both sets can also be played separately, and not necessarily as a complete sequence. I finished the preludes at the end of 2014, incorporating three pieces I had written earlier that I found could fit into my scheme. The first fourteen preludes were written for friends, the last for my wife, and most of them for significant birthdays.

No. 1: C major, Lento []X], is dedicated to my Czech composer friend Pavel Novák, and is a little tribute to his masterly set of 24 preludes and fugues for piano which, like this piece, begin in utter simplicity: my prelude only uses two notes, G and F. It is an upbeat to…

No. 2: C minor, Molto animato [X], dedicated to my friend Michael Bartram on his 70th birthday.

No. 3: G major, Con moto [X], is dedicated to Caroline Grace on her 60th birthday and is, I hope, a graceful piece.

No. 4: G minor, Allegro [X], was composed for Amos Sharp, who premiered it on his bar mitzvah in 2014. The main melody is intentionally modelled on Jewish folk music.

No. 5: D major, Andante [X], is a Ranz des vaches, i.e. a melody played on the alphorn by mountain herdsmen. It was composed on the summit of Monte Maggio near Genoa in Italy, from where I could see the distant Alps. It is dedicated to Justin Broackes and was premiered on his 50th birthday in 2007 by Peter Sheppard Skærved.

No. 6: D minor, Andante, is subtitled ‘A Little Pastoral’ and was originally written for recorder (John Turner) for a concert to celebrate Anthony Hopkins’s 90th birthday in 2010.

No. 7: A major, Andante Festivo [X], was written for the 50th birthday of my fellow symphonist Matthew Taylor. It has (unintentionally) something of the character of Nielsen, a composer we both much admire.

No. 8: A minor, Andante [X], is subtitled ‘After Adrienne’ and begins with a quotation from my Czech composer friend Jaroslav Šťastný’s orchestral piece Adrienne. It was composed for his 60th birthday.

No. 9: E major, Poco con moto [X], was a 60th-birthday present for Judith Bingham and a companion to the E major fugue I composed for her 50th birthday.^[13]

No. 10: E minor, Maestoso [X], is a 70th-birthday present for Robin Holloway, and intended to reflect some of the qualities of his own music.

No. 11: E flat major, Andante grazioso [11], was conceived as a portrait of Sally Cavender, for her 70th birthday.

No. 12: F sharp minor, Luminoso [X], was a 40th-birthday present for my violinist friend Sara Trickey and was inspired by her lyrical and expressisve style of playing.

No. 13: F major, Leggiero e cantando [X], was composed for my friend Robin Leanse and premiered at his 60h-birthday party in 2011 by Aisha Ayezbayeva.

No. 14: B minor, Gently flowing [X], is called ‘The Tui’s Song’, and is based on the extraordinary vocal displays of that New Zealand bird, which I heard from the Auckland garden of my friend Rod Biss, for whose 80th-birthday it was composed.

No. 15: B flat major, Allegro moderato [X], which initiated this project, was written for my wife Jenifer as a companion to her fugue in the same key.^[14]

A PERFORMER’S REFLECTIONS

by Peter Sheppard Skærved

I am always searching for more music to play, music lost in libraries, secreted in codices, posted online, and dumped in second-hand bookshops. I am usually looking for works from the distant past, so it was a surprise, when a few years ago, I discover a work by a living composer, and by a composer who is a friend and collaborator. I was especially surprised that he had not told me about this piece, as he knows that I take a ‘completist’ approach to the composers whose music I love: I want to study, and perform everything. I found David Matthews’ Sonatina [X]–[X] in Travis & Emery, the much-loved treasure-trove on Cecil Court, around the corner from the National Portrait Gallery, just up from Trafalgar Square. The piece was folded into of a cache of music which had come to the shop from the estate of the violinist Yfrah Neaman (1923–2003), well known for his devotion to new music. The copy was clean when it came into my hands: it seems clear that Neaman had not played it. Looking at this work, I was immediately, struck by David’s early command of the violin (he is not a string-player), and that so many of the technical tropes his violin writing (so central to my work for the past two decades) were already in place. But there was an extra fascination attendant to working with this piece with the composer. From the moment that I first sat and worked with David on one of his solo works (Winter Journey,^[15] in 1994), our collaborative process allowed me to get an insight into his compositional process. There are always adjustments, and the take-up and rejection of possibilities has enabled me to build a rudimentary understanding of how he writes.

Sometimes, adjustments are to do with stagecraft, and can come at the very last minute. The 2007 premiere of the Paganini Fantasia [X] took place in the elegant hall of the historic ‘Palazzo Tursi’, Genova, on Paganini’s fantastic Guarnerius del Gesu ‘Il Cannone’ [THIS INFORMATION IS IN DAVID’S ESSAY; ONCE IS ENOUGH!]. It was An inspiriting rehearsal, full of friends: not only David and his wife Jenifer and the photographer Richard Bram but also another composer, Judith Bingham. So there were lots of ideas flying around (and a lot of laughter). We hit upon the way of making the ‘reveal’ moment, one-third of the way into the piece, more exciting, which was that I should play with my back to the audience and turn round abruptly as the music explodes, fortissimo. It worked, and so it stuck.

In the case of the Sonatina, this process was all the more interesting, as it had not happened with the dedicatee of the work, which, although it was played to the composer, was never performed [IN PUBLIC, YOU MEAN?]. The chance to spend time under the scrutiny of the microphone offered an opportunity to delve into this collaborative aspect of the ‘composer’s workshop’. Changes were made, which the repetitive nature of the recording process, married to the opportunity of spending time with the piece in the exquisite acoustic of St John the Baptist, Aldbury, seemed to offer.

A word about that: the ‘landscape’ of violin performance has changed out of all recognition in the past three decades, due in equal measure to the broad impact of the Baroque revival and the work of living composers. If I were to characterise what might have been expected, in the past, of a solo-violin concert ‘back then’, it was ‘virtuosity and risk’, which meant that, invariably, solo concerts relied on Bach and Paganini as their staples (I certainly was guilty of this, starting out). But those two factors – the work of musicians such as Jordi Savall encouraging us violinists to be as attentive to silence as sound, and the explosion of new works for solo string instruments in recent years, responding to the broadest set of artistic parameters – have changed those expectations. Today (except on the international competition circuit) there is no requirement of danger when a string-player walks onstage by him- or herself. We have to thank wind-players for this – or, if I am honest, Claude Debussy. Often, talking to composers and performers about solo repertoire I refer to ‘before Syrinx’ and ‘after Syrinx’. This astonishing work, written in 1913, had an impact equal to or bigger than Stravinsky’s contemporaneous Le sacre du printemps. Once heard, no performer or composer of solo works could/can write without taking into consideration (amongst many other things), Debussy’s profound understanding of the relationship of the lone artist to his surroundings, as he reached back to Hotteterre, to Philidor, to St Colombe, to the sensitivity of the French Baroque. You can observe the ripples spreading, from the Francophone music world, and away from the flute, from Honegger’s Danse de la chèvre to Poulenc’s Un joueur de flûte berce les ruines, given extra impetus by the teaching of Nadia Boulanger (Joseph Horovitz told me that she had asked him to write music that was ‘very thin’), whose American pupils, from Virgil Thomson to Philip Glass and Elliot Carter all produced eminently non-virtuosic works for solo violin, via a moment of greatest profundity in all of Bartók’s solo writing, the Melodia from his Solo Sonata. In our time, it means that a composer such as David Matthews, who is a musical omnivore, can have a foot in both camps, writing something as simple, and challenging, one moment, as Not Farewell [X] and taking on the whole Bach/Paganini challenge in one huge bite, the next, with his ‘Paganini Fantasia’ [X], which includes both four-part fugal writing and the only instance that I know of, of a passage in tenths, accompanied (!), in four parts.

But it was clear, as soon as I put the Sonatina on my practice desk, that this was no juvenilia. The first thing which struck me, was its third movement. I knew this melody well; ten years later, it had become the precipitous violin solo which begins Matthews’ Fifth Quartet (1984). Its first statement was much easier in the solo work, but David made up for that within a minute or so, with filigree embellishments of the theme across the whole compass of the violin. There’s a point which to be made here. Concerto-players, and quartet-leaders spend much time ‘heroically’, high on the E or G strings. Solo-writing relies (in part) on the body of the violin ringing freely; ‘unaccompanied’ works consequently sit for majority of the time in the middle of the instrument, allowing for a longer string-length, and more resonance. Even Paganini’s 24 Capricci are not particularly vertiginous.

Exploring this ‘new work’, I recognised more. The second movement, a high speed, gossamer, toccata [X], has an evanescent, ‘barely there’, shimmer which prefigures the second movement of his Three Studies (1985).^[16] But it’s the first movement where I immediately felt most at home. I think that there should be a special category reserved for artists, writers and composers who have lived, and live, near the tidal Thames. Perhaps that’s simply because I’m one of them, but I feel it in Turner’s views of the river, in Dickens, and it’s there again and again in Matthews who, like me, grew up in the East End of London. It has become ever more apparent in his music, as the natural world which he loves has forced its way into the foreground of his music. Perhaps at this stage, however, it is just the bleak landscape that appears at the beginning of Dickens’s Great Expectations:

The marshes were just a long back horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.^[17]

Meanwhile David has pointed out, that ‘these days, I’m more of an English Channel composer’.^[18] Much of his composing, around the corner from the Thames Estuary, in Deal, Kent, where he has a home.

I am fascinated by the relationship which composers have to their writing. For some, it is a painful, debilitating activity. George Rochberg confessed to me that was why he stopped composing fifteen years before his death. For David, it is something which, it seems, he can’t not do (he shares this with Michael Finnissy). Consequently, he offers friends birthday or anniversary greetings in the form of musical miniatures. These gems provide a glimpse of his compositional craft. When he made the birthday greeting for our mutual friend, American photographer, Richard Bram, he built it almost entirely from Richard’s surname ‘B (flat)–R (‘re’ – D)–A–M (‘mi’ – E) [X]. The outliers were three ‘B naturals’, which are ‘H’ in the German spelling, hence (in my reading) ‘Hip-hip-hurray’. I made a little visual analysis of this conceit for Richard, who does not read music. It reminded me, again, of the astonishing discipline of David’s compositional process. Like Bartók, everything fits, and if something apparently does not, it is designed to stand out, to catch the eye.

David never wastes anything; I asked him to write me a birdsong ‘signal’ as a sort of Shakespearean alarum for my residency at the wonderful Galeria Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City) in 2004. I came to identify very strongly with this obstreperous Song Thrush, so was delighted, reading the his newly completed Twelfth Quartet,^[19] six years later, to find that the ‘my’ Song Thrush was back, in one of the bird-song ‘fantasies’ that mark this piece, at the same pitch and as I had enjoyed playing it in Mexico – repeated, ad lib.

As with all music which I have been lucky enough to premiere, I have more personal relationships with some parts than others. The Fifth Prelude, which I refer to as ‘Monte Maggio’, was actually written, in Liguria, a few days after the premiere of the ‘Paganini Fantasia’. It is, in part, David’s response to my fascination with the Ranz des vaches, which was first described in detail in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique (1767), and brought to perfection in a transcription (which I play), by Giovanni Battista Viotti (1792). I have considerable sentimental attachment to it, as it also exists in a version for two violins, which I first played with my eleven-year old son, Marius, in a concert of David’s music which we gave in a log-cabin in Kussamo, northern Ostrobothnia, Finland. There’s an elegant circularity here: the Italian Viotti, exiled from France to Britain, who spent his weekends walking in Epping Forest with Germaine de Staël, near the house of his benefactors, the Chinnerys, wrote his ‘cow call’ remembering time in the French Alps, inspiring a composer (David Matthews) who grew up on the edge of Epping Forest, walking in the Ligurian Alps, to write his ‘Ranz’, which would be premiered by me, who also grew up on the fringes of the same forest, with my half-Danish son, in the far north. After the Kussamo concert we all went up to the top of a mountain to watch the midnight sun. Two decades after the publication of Viotti’s Ranz des vaches, a British kindred spirit, touring the continent, heard ‘his’ Ranz in the Swiss Alps. It is difficult to read William Wordsworth’s ‘On hearing the”Ranz des Vaches” on the top of the Pass of St. Gothard’, without the sensation that something of Viotti had got to him, or maybe, that, he had read Viotti’s tract, which was circulating in various forms by this point. Wordsworth wrote:

I listen, but no faculty of mine

Avails those modulations to detect,

Which, head in foreign lands, the Swiss affect

With tenderest passion; leaving him to pine

(So fame reports) and die, his sweet-breathed kine

Remembering and green Alpine pastures decked

With vernal flowers. Yet may we not reject

The tale as fabulous. Here, while I recline

Mindful how others love this simple Strain,

Even here, upon this glorious Mountain

(Named of God himself, from dread pre-eminence)

Aspiring thoughts, by memory reclaimed,

Yield to the Music’s touching influence.

And joys of distant home my heart enchain.^[20]

David Matthews’ music sings to us performers and listeners in landscape that Wordsworth and Viotti would have recognised. He, like they, believes that human experience is worthy of celebration and memory.

Disc One– Released 2013

DAVID MATTHEWS AND THE VIOLIN: ONE OF TWO FOR ONE

byPeterSheppard Skærved

In the winter of 1993 I was preparing a series of Bach concerts for Taiwan and Japan. The rehearsals took place in a dark and cold church in North London. My friend Arajit Chakravarty, who was playing in the group, came up to me at some point during the rehearsal week. He pushed a large envelope into my hands: ‘Peter, these pieces are for you. Some publisher sent them to me, and I just can’t bring myself to play them. They’re both pretty strange, so I am sure that youwill like them’. Little did I realise that the two pieces in the package would change my musical outlook for good. They were Winter Journey by David Matthews and Peter Sculthorpe’s Alone. I knew neither work, but they both showed me new and unsuspected musical vistas.

                   I decided to begin with David Matthews’s piece. What I saw filled me with horror; I was too scared to play this stuff. I knew that I was not technically or musically up to this music. I took another look at the two scores and put them away, lost in the enormous pile of un-learnt, un-played repertoire, the sins of omission that are the bad conscience of every musician. But gradually Winter Journey began to niggle me – as much to do with its title and my egocentric, monomaniacal obsession with Schubert’s wandering anti-hero, his alter ego, than initially anything to do with the music. There is a picture taken of me, just before Arajit gave me those two fateful pieces. I am standing in the middle of a snow-covered field, somewhere in Bavaria – a Lowry-esque ‘stick-person’, lost in the snow, setting out on a walk to nowhere, noticed by no one. It seemed to me to be a powerful image of the solo violinist, and chimed in beautifully with both David’s Winter Journey and, naturally enough, the whole Winterreise narrative. I had to play David’s piece. Perhaps I was drawn to the vanity of being Schubert, or at least identified with his state of mind in 1827. Schubert’s friend Josef von Spaun recalled:

For a time, Schubert’s mood became gloomier and he seemed upset. When I asked him what the matter was, he merely said to me, ‘Come to Schober’s today. I will sing you a cycle of awe-inspiring songs.’ We were quite dumb-founded by the gloomy mood of these songs, and Schober said that he only liked one song, Der Lindenbaum. Schubert replied: ‘I like thesesongs more than all the others, and you will come to like them too’.[21]

                  Even before I had learnt David’s own ‘Winterreise’, the impulse to build a concert around it proved irresistible. I wanted to avoid the traditional way of programming solo-violin works, as islands of isolation in the middle of ‘accompanied’ recitals. I had to face-up to two uncomfortable realities. First, I barely knew the solo-violin repertoire. Second, I had neither the technique nor the stamina to play such a concert. I decided on a project. Ringing the promotion departments of every music publisher in Europe, every ‘Music Information Centre’ (M.I.C.), every composer I could think of, I told them that I was assembling a programme of solo-violin music, and please,could they send me everything in their catalogues, and ... I had no money to pay them, not brass farthing. Then I waited. Music began to pour through my letterbox, by composers famous and unknown, young and old. Over 300 scores rained onto my doormat: my postman started to complain. I was astonished at the variety, scale and range of the material that I was seeing, for the first time: it was like stumbling into a cave full of diamonds. I decided that the only way that I could deal with this huge pile of music was through organisation. I bought a stack of really cheap blank audio tapes, rigged up a rudimentary studio in my bedroom overlooking the water in Limehouse, and went to work. Each day, for almost two months, I would study, say, five or six works and then make extremely rough recordings of them. Two things became clear to me: that I had discovered a lifetime’s worth of new repertoire, in a genre that I had not before taken seriously; and that Winter Journey was a masterpiece, one of themost ambitious and successful single-span works ever conceived for the violin. Winter Journey curiously continues to fascinate, and I come back to it, again and again, in the way that I return to Bach’s Chaconne.

                  This disc explores about half of David Matthews’ output for violin alone, a comparatively generous amount for a composer who is not a string-player. Admittedly, pianist-composers such as John Cage and George Rochberg produced large-scale cycles for the instrument, but very few have achieved the variety of approaches that Matthews essays and achieves. To clarify: there are, put simply, two ways of approaching the issue of writing solo works for an essentially melodic instrument. The simplest way of imagining these two approaches would be to bring to mind the language of Debussy’s Syrinx on the on hand and Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin on the other. Bartok’s epochal work treats the violin as complete unto itself, constantly providing a structure of virtuosic harmonic support and counterpoint. By contrast, in Debussy the instrumentalist is ‘unsupported’, placed in an imaginary landscape, which the listener, the player, or maybe, even the acoustic must offer to supply the ‘missing material’. All solo works since Debussy have chosen either route, or a melange of both approaches.

                  David Matthews chooses to work with the violin, from all angles, as is made explicit in the works recorded here. Winter Journey [19] sets the protagonist in a web of interlaced environments, almost a ‘multiverse’. It is apparent, even before a note is played, that the performer is ‘standing’ in a ‘Mitteleuropean’ winter landscape. For some, this landscape is already humming with Schubert, for others, the poetry of Wilhelm Müller. There is really no way of knowing which.This situation is complicated, or enriched, with the first gesture that the audience hears/sees, a flurry of harmonics on the notes D and E, to which the piece will return to close. These function like a Shakespearean ‘alarum’, a reveille. But, bearing in mind the title, and the implicit landscape, mimesis is inescapable: I hear/see ice – falling from the brush of Caspar David Friedrich, perhaps. For me, the Friedrich comparison is useful. Like Schubert, Friedrich had a complex, ambivalent relationship with the winter landscape, talking of ‘the great white cloth, the embodiment of Nature prepared for new life’.[22] In Die Schöne Müllerin, the poem ‘Trockne Blumen’ enshrines a similarly frozen optimism:

Und Lenz wird kommen,

Und Winter wird gehn, 

Und Blümlein werden

Im Grase stehn.

It has always seemed to me that David’s own ‘reading’ of Winterreise, is filled with similar hopefulness; it offers a frame within which his tale of travel can be told. He wrote to me:

I was talking with Judith Bingham. We agreed that all our pieces were connected with incidents in our lives, though sometimes we didn’t realize this at the time. In the case of Winter Journey, however, I did realize the connection, as I had done with my previous piece, which was the First Violin Concerto. That piece was derived from a Dostoyevsky story[23] about a man who meets a woman who has been abandoned by her lover; he consoles and befriends her, and inevitably falls in love with her; whereupon her old lover returns and she goes back to him. The man is left alone, but he is strengthened by the experience and we are to understand, turns it into art. In the Robert Bresson film based on the Dostoyevsky,[24] which I saw and which sparked off the piece, the artist is a painter and the last shots, as I remember, are of him painting furiously. Well, the events of the story happened to me as I was composing this piece, more or less exactly like that, which was uncanny. My next piece was for solo violin; as winter was approaching, I felt rather like the hero of Schubert’s Winterreise. So I decided to base the piece on this. The two quotations from Winterreise which stand at the head of the score are from the first poem, ‘Gute Nacht’, and the seventeenth poem ‘Im Dorfe’. This poem is all about the falseness of dreaming, which the poet spurns. Winter Journey is in the tonality of D. Most of it is in a sort of D minor, but a pure D major emerges towards the end, corresponding to the magical change from D minor to D major in ‘Gute Nacht’. The piece is a single movement in eleven sections. The first, marked ‘Freely, con Fantasia’, is introductory, and presents much of the material of the piece in fragmentary form. In some of the middle sections I had the sound of another D major/D minor masterpiece in mind, Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin. The last D major section is written almost entirely in harmonics, and borrowed very closely from a phrase from ‘Gute Nacht’. The ending vacillates between major and minor, finally choosing the ambiguity of a major second chord on D and F, thus ending just as it began.[25]

                  Three Studies [1]–[3] was written as a test piece for the Carl Flesch Competition. It is, technically,the most straightforward work recorded here. I have spoken with a number of composers about writing test pieces for such competitions. Almost without exception, they talk about the problem of trying to construct a work that will fit all varieties of hands, and most importantly, writing a work which will not need much explanation, since there is no opportunity for the composer to work with the performers. That is not to say that Three Studies is unsophisticated; indeed, I feel that its riches are unlikely to be discovered by a violinist studying it in the short term. Having now performed the piece for a decade-and-a-half, I can say that it continues to reveal unsuspected possibilities, new vistas; the harder that I look at it, the deeper it beds itself into my musical consciousness.

                  From the listener’s point of view, it might seem a little strange that this work is named Three Studies. All the movements are marked to be played attacca, which means that it is difficult to distinguish between the actual movement breaks, thus marked, and the Luftpause between the Britten-esque first section of the third movement, and its concluding Presto. Naturally, this doesn’t really matter, but it does point up that listening to, being part of, a musical landscape such as this one is very different from how it appears on the page.

                  It is in this work that I feel most surrounded by the nature that David loves. He grew up, as I did, on the edge of Epping Forest. The sense of being right on the edge of nature, just able to escape from ‘The Wen’, which I recall, inhabits, indeed, possesses much of his instrumental music. He has the East Londoner’s love of water, of the sharp stench of the Thames at low tide, and the city-dweller’s passion for birds, especially rare ones. The third study [3] begins with what seems to me, to be a ‘song’ at dawn, a very human rhapsody framed by curlews and sandpipers, before the sun, indeed, Turner’s sun, bursts over the horizon (with more than a hint of Britten’s Young Apollo)     The times of day and night dominate these works. The opening movement [1] is typical of David’s ‘midday’ music – high, unsupported ‘solar’ lines such as these are to be found the first of his Four Australian Birds for solo violin (2004) or his solo-violin response to Giovanni Battista Viotti, Monte Maggio (2007). The second movement [2] is clearly a nocturne, but a nocturne of tiptoe-ing, of swiftly closed doors, Capriccio, Il Matrimonio Segreto, all, for the first half anyways, in the dark, ‘under the covers’,the violin muted, everything undiscovered. Suddenly, with the most dramatic ­muteremoval that I know-it comes off on a tremendous crescendo-all is revealed, andthe peccadillo continue, all the lights on in the house, with joyous and reckless abandon!

                  Fifteen Fugues mostly inhabits the ‘opposite space’ from Winter Journey. Like the three Bach fugues which inspired them, they build an entire world in the four-string limits of a violin and bow. The clearest manifestation of this Bach-ian is the total integrity on which Matthews insists on for these works. To illustrate this point: the two-part fugues never have more than  two notes per chord, the three-parts three, and the four-parts, four. This approach might seem obvious, but though Bach’s violin fugues are in three parts, fourth lines offer material derived from the convention of the ‘redundant entry’, where the countersubject of the last entry is given a final statement of the fugue them to play with. Matthews’ approach to fugue is not ‘purer’ than Bach’s, but he sets himself extraordinary standards, especially as Matthews allows himself no discursive material, whereas Bach separates his contrapuntal Stoff with fantasia-like explorations of the secondary melodic material.

                  Matthews’ fugues are made of stern stuff. Even when they are descriptive, evoking birdsong or church bells, there is no slackening of the ‘contrapuntal imperative’. A few of the movements do with freedom, no more, in their codas: Fugue 14 ends with a few seconds of glittering ‘bag-piping’ that whisks me away to the world of Judith Weir’s Bagpiper’s String Trio, and Fugue 12 permits a moment of repetition, highlighting the harmonics which illuminate the close. But such moments are rare. These are works of phenomenal discipline, and most importantly, ‘closed systems’. Like Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s last bridge over the Tamar, they ‘tension’ themselves, requiring no context or external support. Like all great counterpoint, these works can be appreciated, on the page, in silent reading.

                  The origin of the 15 Fugues is, not surprisingly, Bach. In 1999, the composer and I talked in the dressing room at the Purcell Room, after I had given a concert of Bach and Henze solo works. David muttered something about Bach only writing three-voiced fugues for violin, which I did not register properly in my post-concert euphoria. But all came into sharp focus back at my apartment later the same night: The fax machine began to whirr, and a piece of music scrolled out. It was the beginning of a four-part fugue in E minor, with ‘this is as far as I have got, is it playable?’scrawled under it. Never one to take a challenge lying down, I picked up the phone, put my violin under my chin, rang David’s number, and roughly played it into his answering machine, adding, a little glibly: ‘Now you’ll have to write the rest of it’. The result was an extraordinary fugue, written on two staves, which looked far more like piano music than solo violin music, but which is actually very playable, a return to the violinistic values of the middle Baroque. I loved performing that ‘first’ fugue so much, that I begged for more. The result was this first true cycle of fugues for my instrument.

                  David Matthews’s Fifteen Fugues is not only unique in being the only major set of fugues for solo violin, but in that he also succeeds, triumphantly, in balancing this with portraiture. One of his ‘subjects’, Judith Bingham, observes her delight in this extraordinary balancing act: ‘in all the fugues I like the way he has made the most formal structures deeply personal’.[26]

                  This intersect with the world of portraiture is fascinating. For us violinists this begins with the Brno-born violinist, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, who dedicated his equally complex Études Polyphoniques (published in 1865) to the violinists Ferdinand Laub, Antonio Bazzini, Henry Vieuxtemps, Joseph Joachim, Prosper Sainton and Joseph Hellmesberger. Earlier, in 1800, the mysterious Michel Woldemar had composed a set of Sonates Fantômagiques for the ghosts of Giuseppe Tartini, Antonio Lolli, Gaetano Pugnani and Niccolò Mestrino, but these works have remained shrouded in obscurity. In the twentieth century Eugène Ysaÿe, whose ghost lurks behind some of David’s solo writing, continued the tradition. He dedicated his Six Sonates, Op. 27 (1923), to his violinist friends Josef Szigeti, Jacques Thibaud, George Enescu, Fritz Kreisler, Matthieu Crickboom and Manuel Quiroga. What these two cycles share with David’s Fifteen Fugues, difficulty aside, is that each of the pieces is a portrait. David’s portraiture is subtly varied, ranging from the deeply affectionate (the gorgeous finale dedicated to his wife, Jenifer) through to the abstract: I have the impression that Fugue 10, the first to be written, is a hopeful portrait, of how David wishes that I might play, in contrast to the less civilised actuality. I may be wrong.

                  This is, of course, a cycle of fugues without preludes, something which I have never discussed with the composer. I think that there is a sense in which the integrity and tightness of the set would be in some way compromised were non-contrapuntal material permitted. Fugue 1 [4], by contrast, stands to one side, an heraldic opening, fanfare, perhaps even prelude for the whole set, climaxing in the triumphant stretto of the last line. This style of writing, of an ‘alarum-virtuosick’ if you will, returns only once, in the mountainous Fifth Fugue.

                  Fugue 2 [5] also dialogues powerfully with the whole sequence of movements. Its craggy theme serves a double purpose: providing material for the movement itself, but also laying out the tonalities of all fifteen movements. At an early stage in the performing Fifteen Fugues, I repeatedly found myself unable to play Fugues 7 and 8 in the correct order. The composer pointed out that I could do this only if I re-ordered all the notes in this theme, retroactively, as well as all the answering material where appropriate.... I play the fugues in the correct order now.

                  Fugue3 [6] is dedicated to the composer James Francis Brown. This, like Fugue 10, which began all the trouble, is a four-part fugue, the first in the set on two staves. It is written to be played with smooth slurred phrasing. I don’t mind saying that this is a particular challenge in David’s solo writing, and calls to mind the slow contrapuntal passages in Berg’s Violin Concerto. I have treasured memories of my teacher, Louis Krasner, who commissioned and premiered Berg’s masterpiece, demonstrating how such material should and could be played, elegantly and smoothly, the bow ‘wrapping’ around the strings, with no bumps or lunges. He could not understand the aggressive style of Bach that was dominating modern-instrument performance at the time. And this fugue doffs the cap to Bach, or rather to ‘maybe-Bach’, the D minor Toccata and Fugue, now widely agreed to be a transcription of a solo violin piece.

                  Fugue 4 [7] is dedicated to the philosopher Roger Scruton, with whom David Matthews has had a fascinating dialogue going back years. It is, appropriately enough, The Thinker of the set, and highly chromatic, the complete inverse of the open language of the previous movements. Curiously enough, this is the first dedication where I find myself thinking about how Scruton would himself like it played. He has been outspoken in the past as to his predilections in Baroque performance, so I am careful to fill it with the expressive warmth and sincerity he values in performances of Bach.

                  Fugue 5 [8] is, frankly, insanely difficult! The Danish composer Poul Ruders, whose Winter’s Fugue (2007) for solo violin was written after seeing the new technical possibilities that Matthews has opened up, told me that he likes to stand the performer ‘on the edge of a precipice – and push him off!’[27] This fugue certainly does that! The leaping subject, and the tonality, D major, always brings me back to Anton Reicha, who wrote a piano fugue, one of his epic Op. 36 set, based on the opening of Mozart’s ‘Haffner’ Symphony. There are moments in this movement which seem physically impossible. But David is like Arnold Schoenberg, who when told that his Violin Concerto would need a player with twelve fingers, famously answered: ‘I can wait’. He didn’t have to wait long; Louis Krasner also cracked that technical nut, with aplomb. David clearly ‘can wait’, and in rehearsals of his (always) technically challenging solo and chamber music, sits smiling, while the players find their way!

                  Fugue 6 [9] is entirely played pizzicato.Now, of course, there is plenty of chordal music for ‘plucked’ violin; the imitation of guitars has seen to that (the strummed G major chords Britten’s Simple Symphony leap instantly to mind). But pizzicato counterpoint is comparatively rare on the violin. The best-known example is the opening of the second movement of the Fourth Solo Sonata which Ysaÿe dedicated to Kreisler – but it eschews the complex voice-leading that David’s innocent-sounding fugue demands. Yet from the outset Fugue 6 has to sound utterly easeful. It begins with bells in the countryside, evoked by the simplest of harmonics, which, of course, add another degree of complexity, especially when woven into counterpoint played with a couple of fingers on only four strings.

                  Fugue 7 [10] has what may be one of the most intricate subjects every attempted: it is a rare example of the transcription of a birdsong as a fugue subject. The blackbird, which provides the material, has been used a number of times by composers in the twentieth century, most famously Olivier Messiaen (his Merle Noire for flute and piano of 1957 proved the practicality of sourcing material in this way for the composers of our time). Still, in the last 100 years, birdsong has been used comparatively infrequently as the basis of violin music. There is one notable exception, Priaulx Rainier’s Wildlife Celebration, in which the solo-violin part is constructed almost entirely from birdsong (appropriately enough, this little known piece was commissioned by the naturalist Gerald Durrell).

                  Fugue 8 [11] is dedicated to the composer Judith Bingham. To me, it seems to evoke something of her expressive brand of lyrical rhetoric. I am fascinated by the transformation my perception of the fugue theme undergoes as it is ‘worked’. The initial statements might be seen as being posato or even poco esitando. But by the end this ‘gestural pausing’ has metamorphosed, into an almost-lullaby/barcarolle, an original, but natural rocking motion, which loses itself in bells and birdsong over the water. Judith writes:

I was very touched to be included in the dedicatees of these fugues. Listening to mine is like seeing yourself in one of those fragmented cubist paintings, and imagining what each change of colour and mood means. I like to think that David has referred to birdsong in mine, a shared passion. Of course, my idea of how he was imagining me and his may be poles apart, but in all the fugues I like the way he has made the most formal structures deeply personal.[28]

                  Fugue 9 [12] is dedicatedto the composer and conductor Carl Davis. This is most definitely, a portrait, but points up the fact that any act of portraiture is an act of reduction, of selection. David has clearly determined to focus on the forceful energy of Davis’ character, the vigour of his conducting, his decisiveness. Interestingly, this is the only one of David’s Fifteen Fugues which relates to the muscular quality of the Fuga from Béla Bartók’s epochal Sonata, which, in the popular consciousness, re-established the solo-violin work as an accepted concert form. The recording session provided evidence of how the presence of the composer liberates the interpretative process. David was keen to encourage the gruff, almost irascible side of my playing, to a degree which I would not have permitted myself, had he not been in the room.

                  Fugue 10 [13] was the first of the set to be written, and is, the one most closely linked to my own lifelong obsession with Bach Sei Solo, his title for the Sonatas and Partitas. It was interesting that David wrote a fugue of such stately nature, immediately upon hearing my performance of the G minor Fugue, bwv1001, which is the sprightliest of Bach’s set. His fax to me that night began: ‘Inspired by Bach, I began writing a 4-part fugue for violin’. David’s E minor/E major fugue seems, to me, related to the sunrise-like Adagio that begins Bach’s C Major Sonata, bwv1005. I also suspect that, yet again, Ysaÿe’s own E minor Sonata (No. 4) may have more than a little to do with the elegant lyricism of David’s fugue (it is the only one of the Ysaÿe Sonatas which he has heard me play). Here the web of references gets more complex: Ysaÿe himself, wittingly or not, quoted a study by the first great Bach violinist of the modern age, Joseph Joachim, and this CD was recorded on Joachim’s 1698 Stradivari.

                  Fugue 11 [14], dedicated to the pianist William Howard, is a complex weave of references, best disentangled by the composer himself:

In April 2002, William Howard invited me to stay with him at Ninfa, 40 miles SE of Rome, where a fabulous garden was created by three women, the last members of the illustrious Caetani family which had once owned all the surrounding land. The second of these women was married to the composer Don Roffredo Caetani(1871–1961), the third to William’s uncle. The garden was created on the ruins of the medieval town of Ninfa which had been abandoned in the 17th century because of malaria in the nearby Pontine marshes. One of the two surviving medieval buildings housed a Bechstein grand piano which was given to Roffredo Caetani by Liszt, who was his godfather. It was on this piano that I composed the E flat fugue for William, based on the theme of Liszt’s Sonetto123 del Petrarca. Meanwhile the garden day and night was full of the song of nightingales.[29]

                  Fugue 12 [15] is dedicated to the Brno-based composer, Jaroslav Šťastný, a.k.a. ‘Peter Graham’. David has had a long relationship with the community of composers in the Czech Republic, and I am very proud of having played Winter Journey in Leoš Janáček’s house there some years back, a concert which ‘Jarek’ organised. The dedicatee was very moved by the dedication:

to be one of the dedicatees of the David’s Fugues is a great honour for me. David Matthews is surely one of my very closest friends-composers. In his Fugue in F-sharp minor he made so good musical portrait of my personality, that I identified myself with it so much that I used (unconsciously) its first 8 tones in my song Riveting.[30]

The third cyclic performance of Fifteen Fugues was given in Brno.
                  Fugue 13 [16] is the only two-part fugue in the cycle, and the only one that uses of tremolo. This technical device became a bone of contention between musicians in the twentieth century. Many asserted that its use was inappropriate in all but orchestral writing; indeed, Hans Keller waxed lyrical on the subject! But its use here, in a work dedicated to David’s brother, the composer Colin Matthews, points back to their collaborative work with Benjamin Britten at the end of his life. If any work in the cycle evokes Britten’s sound-world, it is this one. There is a fantastic, ‘unison-fugue’ in Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge – David’s fugue explores a related musical landscape. From a technical point of view, this is one of the hardest fugues to perform, as most of the answering material is in contrary motion, inverting the subject material, and surprisingly difficult to bring off on the violin. The dedicatee writes:

I’m staggered by the virtuosity and invention of this cycle, not untypical of the things that my brother gets up to, but on such a scale. Mine is just the kind of shadowy elusive piece that I like, and might have written myself: except that I would have scored it for two violins![31]

                  Fugue 14 [17] uses scordatura, or re-tuning: the lowest string, the G string, is tuned down as semitone, to F sharp. From a technical point of view, this device offers the composer the opportunity to have F sharp as the lowest ‘open string’. But the technique, which subtly alters the stresses within the instrument, also effects changes to the available palette of a violin. This particular tuning seems to increase the delay time of ‘closed’ chords, as well as imparting a silvery, bell-like quality to the highest tessiture. The scordatura technique utilised here is not so distant from that used by Kodály in his Solo Cello Sonata (1915), in which the lowest string is also tuned down, to B natural. The technique of ‘selective’ scordatura has been used comparatively infrequently in the last century, and appears rarely in solo works of this nature. One of the reasons is that the notational problems it poses are considerable, whether a ‘tablature’ solution is used, as by Heinrich Biber or Gustav Mahler (in the Fourth Symphony) or by writing out the notes themselves, leaving the player to solve the concomitant reading problem. The fugue is written on two staves, which offers a unique set of technical challenges.

                  Fugue 15 [18] is emotional. It is dedicated to David’s wife, Jenifer Wakelyn. The first performance was given in my living room, shortly before the couple married. Jenifer writes:

In December 2001, when Peter and Malene [my wife] invited us for tea, David presented Peter with the B flat Major Fugue. Peter played it for us, dazzlingly, on his beautiful Stradivarius – a memory that will always be associated for me with Malene’s exquisite Danish Christmas cookies. In 2003, the whole set came together unforgettably when Peter played the 15 Fugues in St Jude-on-the-Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb on David’s 60th birthday.[32]

I know of no other musical cycle that ends with such an open-hearted declaration of affection, and can think of no other fugue the theme of which is Love itself. That David Matthews has achieved this end is testament to the human universality of his output.