“A battle for the soul of modern music” is how Antony Bye’s booklet-note aptly describes Colin Matthews’s Hidden Variables. Gritty and scintillating modernism contends with unmistakably transatlantic brands of minimalism and post-minimalism. It isn’t easy to say who wins – or, categorically, where Matthews’s sympathies lie (you can’t imitate something so brilliantly if you don’t have any inclination towards it); but as a musical representation of current musical politics it will take some beating – few battle symphonies are as concise, as musically ingenious, or as wickedly funny.
There’s less ambiguous evidence of Matthews’s sense of fun in Machines & Dreams, a toy symphony this time, for orchestra and a virtuoso children’s ensemble playing toy pianos, claxons, sirens, fishing reels, metronomes, football rattles, bird-calls, whistles and assorted computer-game horrors. Messiaen-like bird-song blends with nursery imitations of the real thing in the slow movement, until two of the toy birds meet sticky ends, though the cuckoo seems to have the last laugh in the riotous last movement. I wasn’t sure about it when I heard it live in the Barbican’s Festival of Childhood in 1991 (at which this recording was made), but freed from that context it grows more and more infectious. Quatrain and Memorial are more purely serious exercises – darker, more troubled perhaps, but less bleak and hectically active than Suns Dance and Broken Symmetry on the superbly performed and recorded Knussen/London Sinfonietta disc (DG, 1/96). Luckily for Matthews, Michael Tilson Thomas, the LSO and the Collins recording team have served him just as well here – composers are rarely so fortunate, even in their fiftieth birthday year. As a result, Matthews now has excellent, up-to-date representation in the catalogue – a tribute to the courage of Collins and DG in these worryingly conservative times. So now there really is no excuse for not exploring.'