The Welsh composer William Mathias has been
well treated on disc. His teachers at the Royal Academy of Music
were Lennox Berkeley and Peter Katin. The active Mathias discography
is fairly broad though certain works remain prominent by their
absence. These include the Violin Concerto – premiered by Gyorgy
Pauk and soon forgotten - and the choral-orchestral works: the
choral epithalamium
World’s Fire, the opera
The Servants,
the masque
St Teilo and the morality
Jonah – interesting
that, as Berkeley also wrote a major orchestral-vocal piece on
the same subject innthe late 1930s. The magnificently extravagant
This Worlde’s Joie is available on Lyrita having started
out on EMI Classics. Chandos recorded his equally large-scale
requiem-based
Lux Aeterna.
This Worlde’s Joie is
another anthology work like Bliss’s
Morning Heroes and
The Beatitudes, Vaughan Williams’
Dona Nobis Pacem and
Hodie, Dyson’s
Quo Vadis and Britten’s
Spring
Symphony. The string quartets are on Metier, the symphonies
on Nimbus and many other orchestral works are on Lyrita and smattering
on Nimbus.
The
First Sonata was his first commission from the Cheltenham Festival. It is short, assertive and to the point. It’s as if there’s not a moment to waste. The sonata pours on the intensity in the first movement, is more hauntedly inward and troubled in the second movement with hints of Szymanowski. The third movement ends, rushing and passionate. The work was premiered in 1962 by Tessa Robbins and the pianist Robin Wood. It will be recalled that Robbins premiered the Goossens
Phantasy Violin Concerto and recorded the Ireland Second Violin Sonata for Saga. Geraint Lewis tells us that Robin Wood had in 1961 premiered the Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Llandaff Festival. The Concerto remains unrecorded as does the First. The Third is on Lyrita. The
Second Sonata, across its four movements, casts eerie Celtic spells and otherwise includes some furious and fantastic writing with something of a Hungarian edge to it. It was a commission from the Guild for the Promotion of Welsh Music for the Swansea Festival to mark Mathias’s fiftieth birthday. It was written with Erich Gruenberg and John McCabe in mind and first saw the public light of day at the Brangwyn Hall on 16 October 1984. The early unnumbered
Violin Sonata was completed in 1952. It was premiered in 1953 at Aberystwyth University when violinist Edward Bor was joined by the composer. It’s a much more lyrically romantic piece than the other two and links more obviously with the British violin sonata tradition established by Ireland, Howells and Bax. It may be recalled that Bax is very strongly evoked in Mathias’s
Elegy for a Prince. So it is here but with infusions from John Ireland and Cyril Scott.
Rob Barnett
Sara Trickey (violin); Iwan Llewelyn-Jones (piano) 
