London, St John's Smith Square: David Matthews's ‘A Vision and a Journey’

Extract

A Vision and a Journey is David Matthews's op. 60 – a neat coincidence, then, that the first performance of its revised version should be part of the celebrations of his sixtieth birthday. The work is part of a series of imposing orchestral scores Matthews has been composing over the past two decades, beginning with In the Dark Time in 1983 and continuing with Chaconne in 1985 and The Music of Dawn two years later; this one followed in 1993, when it was premièred by Yan Pascal Tortelier and the BBC Philharmonic, but it underwent a thoroughgoing revision between March 1996 and March 1997. I asked the composer before the concert what the revisions had entailed: ‘I completely rewrote the whole thing. It's more or less a new work’.