Hallé marks the centenary of the First World War with a recording of award winning work by Composer Emeritus Colin Matthews.

The main work on the recording,  No Man's Land follows on from Matthews’ very positive collaboration with Christopher Reid on Alphabicycle Order, written for Hallé in 2007, and stages a dialogue between the ghosts of two dead soldiers whose corpses are strung up on the barbed wire of no man's land.  Matthews describes himself as having being “obsessed” with the First World War for some while (his grandfather died on the Somme) but to having found it to be a difficult subject to treat musically.  He had asked Christopher Reid to provide the text for this work, suggesting the concept of a soldier in the midst of war, almost unaware of what he's found himself in. In the event Reid’s sequence of poems provided something different: the ghosts of two soldiers hang on barbed wire in no man's land.

No Man’s Land won the 2011 British Composer Award in the Vocal category and the recording features leading vocal soloists Ian Bostridge and Roderick Williams for whom the work was written.

Aftertones was commissioned by the Huddersfield Choral Society to mark the millennium and Matthews specifically chose to set poetry of the First World War because he felt that we cannot celebrate the twenty first century without absorbing the lessons of the twentieth.  Edmund Blunden (1896 - 1974) was no conventional war poet, even though he spent more time at the front than any of his colleagues. In the midst of the horrors of the battlefield he was able to sustain a remarkable sense of landscape and place: he remained at heart a pastoral poet and Matthews’ settings underline the essential gentleness of Blunden. That is not to pretend that there is no darkness: the first poem depicts a bleak war-torn landscape, yet the mood is one of nobility rather than bitterness.

In the 150th anniversary year of Mahler’s birth, the Hallé Orchestra joined with the BBC Philharmonic to present a cycle of Mahler's symphonies at the Bridgewater Hall.  Each symphony was coupled with a new composition by a living composer and Crossing the Alps was commissioned by Hallé to be programmed alongside Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony.  Colin Matthews has said that ‘Mahler has been the most important composer in my life for nearly 50 years...’ and he decided that rather than try to emulate Mahler in any way he wanted to contrast his setting of the Resurrection Ode with an essentially humanist message.    The text is taken from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Book VI.

This recording was made possible thanks to funding from The Boltini Trust.

Colin Matthews  is Composer Emeritus of the Hallé. He studied music at the Universities of Nottingham, and Sussex, where he also taught, and subsequently worked as assistant to Benjamin Britten from 1972 - 6, and with Imogen Holst from 1971 - 84.  He collaborated with Deryck Cooke for many years on the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.   Since the early 1970s his music, ranging from solo piano music through three string quartets and many ensemble and orchestral works, has been played worldwide by leading soloists, orchestras and conductors and has won numerous international awards.

Matthews is currently Prince Consort Professor of Music and Fellow of the Royal College of Music, a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was a Governor from 2001-2008, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Composition at the University of Manchester. He was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in 2010.  He was presented with the RPS/PRS Leslie Boosey Award in 2005, and was appointed OBE in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to music.

He is published by Faber Music: https://www.fabermusic.com/we-represent/colin-matthews

Recorded at Halle St Peter’s, Ancoats, Manchester on 4–9 June 2014.

Steve Portnoi Producer /Balance engineer; Graham Jacob & Jeremy Oxley.

Assistant Engineers; Steve Portnoi Editing and Mastering.

“Matthews has provided a strikingly atmospheric score, regularly drawing on the idioms (and sometimes the actual recordings) of marches and sentimental songs of the period in an approach that recalls Mahler's use of similar material to equally ironic effect. The final impression is of a subject drawing something powerfully distinctive from Matthews in its alternation of detached emotional observation and compassion.” The Guardian

Conductor
Nicolas Collon; Richard Wilberforce

Soloists/Artists
Roderick Williams, Baritone
Richard Wilberforce, Director
Ian Bostridge, Tenor

Chorus
Hallé Choir
Hallé Youth Choir

Catalogue number CD HLL 7538

Preview: https://orcd.co/yjkdaxb