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Music

How does David Matthews get away with writing symphonies with tunes in them?

19 May 2018

9:00 AM

19 May 2018

9:00 AM

‘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.

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