572292Bk Mathias EU 572292Bk Matthias 26/01/2011 12:40 Page 4
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572292bk Mathias EU_572292bk Matthias 26/01/2011 12:40 Page 4 Sara Trickey William Sara Trickey enjoys an award-winning career as both solo violinist and chamber musician. She studied at Cambridge University, the Royal College of Music, and with MATHIAS Camilla Wicks at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In duo recital she has appeared at major venues throughout Britain, including recently the Purcell Room and (1934–1992) the Royal Opera House in London and St David’s Hall in Cardiff. She has broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and on Welsh television, collaborating with pianists including Stephen Kovacevich, Iwan Llewelyn-Jones, and Tom Poster. She also has a violin duo Violin Sonatas with Andrew Watkinson. An experienced concerto player, she has performed major elements of violin repertoire with orchestras that include the City of London Sinfonia and the Orchestra of St Johns. She was also the featured violinist at the Presteigne Sara Trickey, Violin Festival in 2007, where she will return in 2011 and 2012. Here, she performed the violin and piano piece Adonis, written for her by David Matthews. She also led the prize-winning Bronte Quartet for five years. Iwan Llewelyn-Jones, Piano Photo: John Batten Iwan Llewelyn-Jones Iwan Llewelyn-Jones studied at Oxford University and the Royal College of Music, London. He won several awards including the Coolidge Scholarship, the Hopkinson Gold Medal, Chopin Prize and Instrumental Duo Award as well as being a prize- winner at several international piano competitions in Britain, France, Spain, and Italy. He has appeared as a soloist and with orchestras throughout the world to great acclaim including Wigmore Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), the Sydney Opera House, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, and St David’s Hall and the Millennium Centre in Cardiff. He broadcasts regularly on Radio 3 and S4C, and has been the recipient of several awards and honours, including the Sir Geraint Evans Award in recognition of his significant contribution to Welsh music and a Creative Wales Award from the Arts Council of Wales. Photo: Rhian Ap Gruffydd 8.572292 4 572292bk Mathias EU_572292bk Matthias 26/01/2011 12:40 Page 2 William Mathias (1934–1992) wastes no time in presenting the essence of its argument a considerable iceberg. Written after finishing his school as two sharply contrasted ideas: the first ‘spiky and exams, the sonata went with him as an undergraduate to Violin Sonatas aggressively rhythmic’ (to quote the composer) and the Aberystwyth and was the first work of his to be publicly William Mathias was born in Whitland in orchestras. But following the inclusion of the Wassail second ‘melodic and flowing’. These pivot around the performed at the University, when the composer played Carmarthenshire on 1st November, 1934, and died on Carol in the 1964 Christmas Eve Festival of Nine notes C sharp, E and D which proceed to form the it with the violinist Edward Bor on 16th May, 1953. He 29th July, 1992, at Menai Bridge on Anglesey. His Lessons and Carols broadcast from King’s College respective tonal centres of the three unfolding obviously thought well enough of this teenage work to contribution to the development of music in Wales Chapel, Cambridge, commissions for church, organ and movements so that the longer-term direction of the enter it a little later as the first item in his personal during the second half of the twentieth century was choral music began to flow and Mathias went on to sonata evolves organically from its initial thematic catalogue of compositions though, perhaps significantly, enormously wide-ranging and along with Alun carve a niche in this field as a composer with a fresh and kernel. The central slow movement has the character of without an opus number. But along with some two Hoddinott (1929-2008) he is one of very few Welsh distinctive voice. He held strongly to Britten’s view that an intensely lyrical ‘berceuse’ while the energetically dozen other works written during his student years the composers to establish an international reputation. He a composer should work within the immediate dance-like finale gradually resolves the tensions of the sonata was subsequently withdrawn and never studied at Aberystwyth University and then at the Royal community and his natural gift for vivid and accessible work as a whole. performed again, nor was it offered for publication as Academy of Music with Sir Lennox Berkeley and Peter communication was perfect for such an approach. Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 94 was the result of a part of an exclusive contract with Oxford University Katin. On leaving London in 1959 Mathias was Believing firmly that the sacred and secular were commission from the Guild for the Promotion of Welsh Press in 1961. Towards the end of his life in 1992 appointed lecturer in music at Bangor University and indivisible Mathias’s overall legacy is richly varied yet Music to be given at the Swansea Festival in celebration Mathias went systematically through his entire apart from a year as composition lecturer at Edinburgh coherently integrated. The two further symphonies and of Mathias’s fiftieth birthday year. He chose to write a compositional archive, prior to its being housed in the University (1968-9) he remained at Bangor, where he string quartets, eight concertos and other concertante, work for the distinguished violinist Erich Gruenberg in National Library of Wales, and singled out those was Professor of Music from 1970 until his early chamber and orchestral works thus rub shoulders partnership with composer-pianist John McCabe and the withdrawn works which he thought should see the light retirement in 1988. In 1972 he established the North happily with the opera The Servants, masque St Teilo, première was given at the Brangwyn Hall on 16th of day – and this sonata was firmly not among them. He Wales Music Festival and continued to direct this annual morality Jonah, cantata This Worlde’s Joie, requiem- October, 1984. The sonata is cast in four vividly was in fact vehemently opposed to the posthumous event until his untimely death. He was frequently active variant Lux Aeterna and choral epithalamium World’s contrasted movements and makes virtuosic demands of rehabilitation of a composer’s hidden works, as was as a conductor and pianist and served several public Fire; and the introspective medieval brooding of the both performers. When compared to the First Sonata, indeed happening in the case of Benjamin Britten. In bodies and committees, most notably the Welsh Arts orchestral Requiescat can naturally form part of the the Second has on the one hand an even greater degree recent years, however, the composer’s estate has Council in Cardiff and the BBC’s Central Music same creative vision as the joyful anthem composed for of thematic concentration while on the other it is more carefully considered some requests to release Advisory Panel in London. After an initial visit in 1975, the wedding of HRH The Prince of Wales to the late ambitious in scale and structural design. The opening embargoed scores on a limited basis, and so, when it was every year from 1982 onwards he went to America, Lady Diana Spencer on 29th July, 1981, in St Paul’s movement material is pared to the bone and the violent suggested in 2008 that the Violin Sonata might be where his music and personality became increasingly Cathedral. initial contrast is the most extreme the composer ever included on this recording, permission was granted for popular. The death of such a major figure at the height The Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 15, was Mathias’s first countenanced – a sense of pent-up tension giving way an exploratory private performance. As a result of this of his powers was an immeasurable loss not only to commission from the Cheltenham Festival, where it had immediately to intense introspection. A sonata-form session at London’s Wigmore Hall in the summer of composition but to the general burgeoning of musical its première on 12th July, 1962, with Tessa Robbins and dialogue is set up whose unresolved argument has 2009 it was agreed that, although it was clearly not a life in Wales and its influence in the wider world. the pianist Robin Wood. A year earlier Wood had given enough force to unwind through a single-minded fully representative work, it was nevertheless of such As prolific as he was versatile, Mathias left a the first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. scherzo-toccata and an elegiac central slow movement. astonishing power and originality as a self-taught pre- catalogue of nearly 200 published works in virtually all 13, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the The exuberant finale then emerges without a break from student work that it should be heard in that light. The musical genres. Coming, as he did, from an indigenous Llandaff Festival and a sketch for the sonata dates back a sinewy cadenza and its unbridled energy runs through public second première at Galeri, Caernarfon, on 2nd culture dominated by singing and amateur music- as far as November 1958, just a matter of months before a rondo structure capable of both encompassing and July 2010 eloquently confirmed such an impression and making, he was determined to establish his credentials work also began on the concerto. The sonata was then resolving the earlier dialectic impasse towards an so this ambitious and emotionally direct music can now as a composer armed with a formidable technique in the composed between March and July 1961 when the exhilarating runaway ending. cast a valuable light on the mind-set of the young fields of instrumental and orchestral music.