March 2025 saw Colin Matthews featured as guest composer at Illinois State University as part of their Red Note Festival. Alongside masterclasses with undergraduate and postgraduate students, the ISU Symphony Orchestra performed Matthews’ Berceuse for Dresden with Cora Swenson Lee as soloist and conducted by Useon Choi.
The 11-minute work for cello and orchestra was commissioned the Friends of Dresden Music Foundation to commemorate the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche Dresden, destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. It is based on the sounds of the eight bells of that church, where it was premiered by Jan Vogler with Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic in 2005. The work subsequently appeared with Leonard Elschenbroich, the Hallé Orchestra and Mark Elder at the BBC Proms.
The pitches of the bells are transformed into long melodic lines for the soloist, with their overtones providing the work with its underlying harmonic framework. Though its title suggests a lullaby or cradle song, the work is turbulent, impassioned, and lamenting as well as lyrical. From this suffering there is the promise of rebirth, captured in the story of its dedicatee Victor Klemperer. The destruction of the city was, paradoxically for Klemperer and his wife, a form of liberation – he had spent the days before the bombing delivering letters to his fellow Jews warning them that they would be transported later that week. The resulting chaos allowed Klemperer and his wife to flee to safety.
A chamber concert saw performances of his Fifth String Quartet from the ISU Faculty String Quartet, Six Chinese Songs from tenor Justin Vickers and pianist Geoffrey Duce, and Out in the dark, a setting of Edward Thomas performed by mezzo Elizabeth Thompson. String Quartet No.5 delves deeper into the shadowy world of the Fourth Quartet (2012). Subdued, introverted, and shot through with silences, it is only towards the end of its 11-minute span that something more affirmative breaks through, before falling back to the hesitancy of the opening.
Six Chinese Songs (2018-20) was composed as a companion to Britten’s Songs from the Chinese, in memory of the tenor’s father John E. Vickers (1942–2017). In turn, the 12-minute cycle it is a reflection on Matthews’ own musical father – Britten – for whom Matthews worked as his last musical assistant, helping to bring many of Britten’s late masterpieces to fruition. The songs set selections from Poetry from Chinese Antiquity in translations by Arthur Waley and were recorded alongside Britten’s The Poet’s Echo and Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in 2023.
Matthews will be in focus at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2025, which sees several world premieres: his debut opera A Visit to Friends, with a libretto after Chekhov by William Boyd, Paraphrases for violin and piano from Leilia Josefowicz and Huw Watkins, his String Quartet No.6 from the Gildas Quartet, and Book 2 of his celebrated orchestrations of Debussy’s Images from Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra.