‘Much of the opening movement does stem from the guileless carol melody that had fired the creative process… the ingenious transformations generate exuberant invention … A work that otherwise manages to seem unmistakably British without ever becoming derivative.’

The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 10 May 2018

 

‘There’s an engaging frankness to the simple, carolling woodwind melody with which the symphony opens, and a proud indifference to fashion in the way Matthews brings that same theme back for a C major peroration at the end of the fifth and final movement. This is a pastoral symphony quite unlike Vaughan Williams’s, with a sense of direction — and affirmation — that Nielsen and Sibelius (Matthews’s avowed models) would have recognised. Nostalgia doesn’t come into it (the thumping rhythms and whooping horns of the second movement are like a blast of R’n’B from a passing

car stereo). Matthews’s symphony seems to me to belong instead to that particular British literary tradition, from Gilbert White to Richard Mabey, which finds spiritual renewal in a meticulous and unsentimental observation of nature. The audience actually cheered.’

The Spectator (Richard Bratby), 19 May 2018