“A welcome disc shines light on David Matthews's rhapsodic, fantastic music. Guy Johnstonis a technically immaculate soloist, while Ruman Gamba with the BBC Philharmonic are excellent throughout in first-rate recordings.” --Gramophone, Abril 2009
“The music speaks so directly and involving that you're caught up in it from the start. …A Vision and a Journey lives up to its title impressively: taking Sibelius as an inspiration… was clearly no bad thing. Strong persuasive performances, especially from Guy Johnston in the Concerto, are caught in exemplary sound.” --BBC Music Magazine, June 2009 ****
“The music speaks so directly and involving that you're caught up in it from the start. …A Vision and a Journey lives up to its title impressively: taking Sibelius as an inspiration… was clearly no bad thing. Strong persuasive performances, especially from Guy Johnston in the Concerto, are caught in exemplary sound.” --BBC Music Magazine, June 2009 ****
“Of these three orchestral works, only one – AVision and a Journey – is termed a 'symphonic fantasy'. Yet The Music of Dawn and Concerto inAzzurro could also be similarly described. They too rely on flexibly organised single-movement structures that display strong and positive links with the great 19th-century tradition of the programme symphony and tone-poem.
The earliest of the three, The Music of Dawn, is a richly scored response to a painting by Cecil Collins that makes no bones about sharing its musical imagery with other representations of sunrise and the sense of new beginnings – by Wagner, Strauss, Ravel, Schoenberg – but in a spirit of homage rather than dependency, creating something distinctive out of the contrasts between dance-like exuberance and soulful lyricism, and always with a personal angle on what in other contexts might be heard as explicit allusions to earlier models.
A Vision and a Journey reinforces the aspirational theme, suggesting a kind of pilgrim's progress, or hero's life, as it travels through well defined stages of fervent, at times rhapsodic questing. There are brief hints of Tippett in the string writing, but the heritage represented by such ultra-Romantic composers as Bax and Bantock is not spurned either, in a dramatic and engaging fantasia which is all the more effective for its imaginative way with some very simple basic ideas.
Concerto in Azzurro – 'concerto in blue' – is another evocation of light, sky, and an underlying sense of the transcendent. Although its insistent rhythmic and melodic patterns risk earnestness now and again, the concerto builds persuasively to a marvellously understated, touchingly poetic ending. Guy Johnston is a technically immaculate soloist, while Rumon Gamba with the BBC Philharmonic are excellent throughout in first-rate recordings.” --Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010
The earliest of the three, The Music of Dawn, is a richly scored response to a painting by Cecil Collins that makes no bones about sharing its musical imagery with other representations of sunrise and the sense of new beginnings – by Wagner, Strauss, Ravel, Schoenberg – but in a spirit of homage rather than dependency, creating something distinctive out of the contrasts between dance-like exuberance and soulful lyricism, and always with a personal angle on what in other contexts might be heard as explicit allusions to earlier models.
A Vision and a Journey reinforces the aspirational theme, suggesting a kind of pilgrim's progress, or hero's life, as it travels through well defined stages of fervent, at times rhapsodic questing. There are brief hints of Tippett in the string writing, but the heritage represented by such ultra-Romantic composers as Bax and Bantock is not spurned either, in a dramatic and engaging fantasia which is all the more effective for its imaginative way with some very simple basic ideas.
Concerto in Azzurro – 'concerto in blue' – is another evocation of light, sky, and an underlying sense of the transcendent. Although its insistent rhythmic and melodic patterns risk earnestness now and again, the concerto builds persuasively to a marvellously understated, touchingly poetic ending. Guy Johnston is a technically immaculate soloist, while Rumon Gamba with the BBC Philharmonic are excellent throughout in first-rate recordings.” --Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010
