'There was an attractive new piece by David Matthews, Burnham Wick, that developed the composer’s long preoccupation with translating landscape into sound.  Written in memoriam to Michael Tippett, it observed the synthesis of the exotic and the pastoral in Tippett’s music, and those bounding, interrupted dance-figures that sometimes do but don’t take off into sustained flight'
The Independent on Sunday (Michael White), 28 February 1999
 
'… David Matthews’s Burnham Wick, an adorable piece conceived during a walk in Essex marshland.  A plink from the harp summons airy strings and a corn bunting call on the clarinet.  Another dose of rural nostalgia?  Not quite.  There is trouble afoot in Matthews’ countryside.  Strings launch into an impassioned, hurt elegy, and when the solo violin’s skylark ascends in a nod to Vaughan Williams, it is a 999 call from an endangered species'
The Times (Geoff Brown), 25 February 1999