We are delighted to welcome back one of the world’s finest chamber groups, the Nash Ensemble, for this collection of world premiere recordings by composer David Matthews.

David Matthews spent three years as an assistant to Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh in the late 1960s. His soundworld is rooted in the English romantic tradition of Elgar and Vaughan Williams and this is evident in the dramatic settings of Pushkin (Winter Passions), Shakespeare (Terrible Beauty) and TS Eliot (Marina), all stunningly performed by baritone Stephan Loges and mezzo Susan Bickley.

The ravishing Terrible Beauty, Op.104, for mezzo-soprano and seven players (flute, bass clarinet, harp and string quartet) was composed in 2007 and is largely a setting of Enobarbus’s famous eulogy of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, describing her progress down the River Cydnus to Tarsus in a gilded barge, attended by servants dressed as sea nymphs and watched by all the citizens of the town.

In Winter Passions, Matthews conjures up a Russian scene with the use of traditional Russian folksong and pizzicato on the strings sounding like the strumming of a balalaika.