Eighteen years separate the two symphonies of William Mathias. In 1965 he was a promising 30 year old whose most obvious debts were to Walton and Tippett, with Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky and perhaps even Sibelius discernible in the background. The First Symphony's three fast movements are all well-proportioned, bustling and brightly if weightily orchestrated. It is in the slow movement, placed third, that the dangers of allowing form to slip out of focus, and of using over-succulent orchestral colour to prop up fairly reach-me-down ideas, are most evident. For a first effort the symphony is creditable, at times exciting, but comparison with, say, Tippett's Second underlines Mathias's tendency to relax into rather easy-going rhapsodizing, a quality reinforced by a recording steeped in hazy resonance, although it is clear that the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra is commendably alert throughout.
By 1983 the romantic, reflective strain in Mathias's style is more dominant and more elaborate. The Second Symphony seeks to evoke various aspects of Celtic myth and civilisation, and alongside the musical landscapes and celebrations of his formidable contemporary Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Mathias's can seem diffuse and soft-centred. Yet in his concern to express epic, heroic sentiments, rather than intensely bleak or straightforwardly Bacchanalian moods, Mathias probably comes closer to evoking the lost world of Sir Arnold Bax than he does to any composer of his own generation. There is certainly more of Tintagel than of Silbury Air in the Second Symphony, for although a propensity for streams of busy orchestral colouring suggest links with Lutoslawski, the considerable reliance on rather conventional fanfare material would create some incongruously cinematic associations if one were not persuaded that its musical roots ran deeper, into a musical rhetoric that preceded the heyday of Hollywood. The symphony's climaxes are effectively prepared, but for too much of the time the music's progress seems undermotivated—an effect the recording does little to contradict, since it is stronger on depth than immediacy, and in loud passages brass and percussion threaten to submerge all else. The playing itself is admirable.'