Seascapes, an album of works for voice and ensemble by Colin Matthews, was released by Onyx in May 2026. Collecting four song cycles from the last two decades, the recording shows off the colouristic range and eloquence of Matthews’ vocal and instrumental writing; it features Nash Ensemble, soprano Claire Booth, baritone Marcus Farnsworth, and conductor Jessica Cottis. Listen here.
What’s striking throughout these four song cycles is the kaleidoscopic sound world he creates with such forensic precision, whether he has seven players to work with or 17. The songs teem with detail…Matthews’s music, moving chameleon-like through different styles, brings [Baudelaire’s poetry] alive as a study in how words can be reinterpreted from a myriad of angles.
The Guardian (Erica Jeal) 28 May 2026 Album of the Week ****
Matthews discusses the album on the Gramophone podcast here. The titular work is a 13-minute setting of poet Sidney Keyes, scored for a dark-hued group of nine instruments: alto flute, oboe, bass clarinet, horn, harp, piano, violin, viola, and cello. Its music suggests surging seas, nocturnal estuaries, and dark premonitions, and memories of the past. It premiered with Nash Ensemble and Booth in 2021 at Wigmore Hall, with soprano and ensemble returning to the work in March 2023.
As Time Returns is a 20-minute setting of Czech poet Ivan Blatný for baritone and ensemble. The most operatic of Matthews’ song cycles, It functions like a dramatic monodrama, with moments of biting, black irony contrasted with nostalgic, dream-like sections where Blatný – exiled in 1948 to England, where he grew increasingly paranoid and unsettled – remembers his past. Matthews sets a mixture of poems from the 1940s in translation as well as his polyglot later verse, combining English, Czech and German.
The Island also turns to twentieth-century poetry, setting Stephen Cohn’s translations of Rilke for soprano. A gift for Claire Booth and Nash Ensemble, the 10-minute cycle sets three linked poems from 1907-1908, with the inward atmosphere of the first two giving way to a greater breadth in the third. The subtlety and intimacy of the verse is cushioned by the mellow hues of Matthews’ orchestration, gravitating towards alto flute, horn, and lower strings.
The album concludes with A Land of Rain is a 25-minute setting for medium voice of Nicholas Moore’s translations of Baudelaire, whose premiere was conducted by Oliver Knussen in 2017. Mostly written under pseudonyms for a competition in the Sunday Times, the eccentric poems embrace a vast stylistic diversity – sometimes serious, more often parodistic – an approach which Matthews has mirrored in his settings. Whilst the more light-hearted songs recall something like the madcap energy of William Walton’s Façade, the overriding mood is of a deep and listless ennui.
The album unites key Matthews collaborators; Nash Ensemble have been performing his music for over forty years; Booth has been singing his work since the early 2000s. Jessica Cottis and Marcus Farnsworth appeared in the world premiere of A Visit to Friends at the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival, Matthews’ debut opera, created with writer William Boyd.