Natural selection | 17 May 2018

‘All fish in flood and fowl of flight/ Be mirthful now and make melody’ writes the poet William Dunbar in the verses that Sir Charles Hubert Parry set to music as Ode on the Nativity. In David Matthews’s new Ninth Symphony, one particular fowl does exactly that. The symphony’s central movement begins on strings: an idyll of grey skies and shivering leaves. Matthews gradually introduces blocks of woodwind and brass, including a heavily stylised burst of birdsong. And then, in the stillness of the movement’s closing bars, the E flat clarinet imitates the voice of what Matthews calls ‘my local song thrush’ — unmistakably drawn from life, but equally clearly showing the hand of the artist: heightened, pure, somehow more real than any field recording.

Naive? Yes and no: Messiaen made birdsong respectable in contemporary music, but many of his imitators — hearing only rhythmic complexity where he perceived divine harmony — end up sounding likea bag of spanners. Matthews’s thrush makes a more joyful noise. A couple of years back, Matthews wrote a short vocal work called Dawn Chorus: four minutes of the art that conceals art, in which human voices imitate birdsong with hallucinatory precision. In the Ninth Symphony, it’s as if that window is still wide open. Morning air blows through it: there’s an engaging frankness to the simple, carolling woodwind melody with which the symphony opens, and a proud indifference to fashion in the way Matthews brings that same theme back for a C major peroration at the end of the fifth and final movement.

This is a pastoral symphony quite unlike Vaughan Williams’s, with a sense of direction — and affirmation — that Nielsen and Sibelius (Matthews’s avowed models) would have recognised. Nostalgia doesn’t come into it (the thumping rhythms and whooping horns of the second movement are like a blast of R’n’B from a passing car stereo).