Matthews No Mans Land - Crossing The Alps - Aftertones Collon Williams Bostridge Wilberforce

Matthews describes himself as having being “obsessed” with the First World War for some while (his grandfather died on the Somme) but to having found it to be a difficult subject to treat musically. He had asked Christopher Reid to provide the text for this work, suggesting the concept of a soldier in the midst of war, almost unaware of what he's found himself in. In the event Reid’s sequence of poems provided something different: the ghosts of two soldiers hang on barbed wire in no man's land. The recording features leading vocal soloists Ian Bostridge and Roderick Williams for whom the work was written. No Man’s Land won the 2011 British Composer Award in the Vocal category Aftertones was commissioned by the Huddersfield Choral Society to mark the millennium and Matthews specifically chose to set poetry of the First World War because he felt that we cannot celebrate the twenty first century without absorbing the lessons of the twentieth.