It’s hard to think of a living musician more embedded in British musical life than Colin Matthews – not just as a composer and arranger, but teacher, label-founder, producer and administrator. The approach of his 80th birthday seems to have spurred rather than slowed a composer who warmed up by premiering his first opera in 2025, and now marks the milestone itself with a new oboe concerto for longtime colleagues the London Symphony Orchestra and their principal oboe Olivier Stankiewicz.
Nearly 20 years on from 2009’s Violin Concerto, Matthews’s uncompromising structural vision has only intensified. His solo oboe might stand apart from the orchestra, but is locked into its musical argument, helping to tussle themes and ideas into their ultimate form in a dynamic – often combative – back and forth.
If the choice of oboe suggests English pastoral, Matthews is quick to dispel the association. A summoning upward flourish from the soloist launches a single continuous movement, Stankiewicz’s agile, peremptory oboe an almost constant presence. Texturally dense, forcing the soloist to ride the storm (precisely marshalled by conductor Elim Chan), the music throws out challengers in the form of a raucous, jazz-tinged clarinet and a seductive cor anglais. And there’s no resolution in an ending that’s more an emergency stop, flung at the audience like a challenge. This isn’t music going gently, it’s a piece still wrestling heroically with definitions.
It’s a natural partner for Rachmaninov’s final work, 1940’s Symphonic Dances, whose web of allusions and quotations – a waltz, the Dies Irae chant, a theme from his First Symphony – grapples with musical history and identity. Chan is a compelling figure on the podium, feet moving like a boxer, fists raised with no baton. There’s nothing fantastical about her account; instead we get a deep internal logic, dances with the emphasis on the “Symphonic”, an overarching continuity through the composer’s phantasmagoria of episodes.
The same structural clarity is at work in Bartók’s Dance Suite, where Chan never lets the glittering surface (and glitter it absolutely does, especially in the woodwind solos of the Allegro Vivace and the grotesque little flickers of the opening movement) warp the underpinning architecture.
