Colin Matthews' Playlist

Colin Matthews’ Fifth Quartet will be premiered at Tanglewood this summer, and in a lunchtime Prom. Amongst other activities he is the founder of NMC Recordings.

Where to start? Either a huge list of everything under the sun, or what looks like a random choice (tomorrow it could be quite different). I’m tempted to throw in the whole NMC catalogue, but have restricted myself to two; and as others who’ve done the playlist have moved away from strictly contemporary I’m doing the same.

Reinbert de Leeuw’s Der nächtliche Wanderer is an extraordinary return to composition after 40 years of near silence. Impossible to describe, but I know of no other orchestral works that begin with a barking dog...

Hans Abrahamsen is another who stopped composing - in his case the silence lasted no more than a decade, but he was much missed. The appearance of the Piano Concerto in 2000 marked a new beginning : music of wonderful sensibility and subtlety.

Olly Knussen (who belongs here in his own right, but nobody needs me to tell them to listen to his music) often sends me mystery pieces, some of them unguessable like Pierre-Octave Ferroud’s 1930 Symphony in A major (well, I got the nationality right!). He was killed in a car crash in his thirties - the potential is equally unguessable.

I have what is perhaps an unhealthy obsession with music left unfinished by their composers. Rather than include Bruckner 9 (the Rattle recording with the Samale/Mazzuca & co finale) or Elgar 3, I’m going for the tantalising fragments of Sibelius 8, only recently unearthed, and (in this case, I hope) not likely to be worked into what is surely an unachievable symphony.

I don’t produce as much for NMC as I used to, but here are two that I was much involved with : Birtwistle’s magisterial Mask of Orpheus, whose final Exodos really needs to be heard in the context of the whole, but on its own is an exceptional example of Birtwistle’s remarkable fade outs. (Listen on Spotify playlist.)

David Sawer’s Byrnan Wood was one of our early CD singles; here is his magical Tiroirs, played by the lovely BCMG and Susanna Mälkki. (Listen on Spotify playlist.)

And to finish, a favourite Tom Waits song - one of his best tunes wrecked by his inimitable voice.