recent press

download pdf press kit with information and recent articles, including the New York Times' coverage of the premiere of Songs of Desire, Love and Loss.

download profile of composer james matheson by russell platt, music critic and editor at The New Yorker

 

From Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, February 11, 2008

"Joined by clarinetist Garrick Zoeter, the group launched into The Anatomy of Melancholy by James Matheson, which they premiered two days ago in Chicago. The piece, written for the group, had a surprisingly beautiful and eerie feel. The composer created a delightful effect by having the violin or cello pluck the same notes at the same time as Huebner hit the keys - creating an almost bell-like sound. Later in the piece, the four players bounced a note back and forth and then finished in a frenzy."

  - Laura Stevens

From The OC Register (Orange County, CA), December 5, 2007

"James Matheson's Songs of Desire, Love, and Loss, a song cycle for soprano (Botti again, tracing and piercing) and mixed ensemble, gave seven poems by Alan Dugan an evocative treatment, the soprano unfolding words carefully and pointedly while the instruments provided dappled, dovetailed, secretive underpinning – painting the place of the poems."

  - Timothy Mangan

From The Los Angeles Times, December 6, 2007

"Matheson's Songs of Desire, Love and Loss, which Stucky conducted, illustrates and dramatizes seven poems by Alan Dugan. Matheson tends to build to a punch line, which often helps clarify Dugan's slight obscurities. You may not know what the poet means, but the music at least directs you to the right place emotionally. Botti, as soloist, supplied heaps of passion."

  - Mark Swed

From San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 2007

"I was most engaged by Matheson's Falling, a piano trio eloquently played by pianist Julie Steinberg, violinist Roy Malan and cellist Leighton Fong. Matheson's notes identify this as a variation set without a "theme per se." The model, in other words, is closer to the Baroque passacaglia -- variations based on a repeated bass line or sequence of harmonies -- than to the traditional melodic transformations.

"Matheson sets the stage crisply, with a sequence of lustrous, surprising piano chords marching slowly two by two, like animals into the ark. Then he proceeds to adorn the sequence -- with a walking bass in the piano, with floral sprays of triplets from the piano and violin and finally with a gentle lullaby.

"The effect is amiable and often sumptuous, and there's a touching innocence to Matheson's writing."

   - Joshua Kosman

From MusicWeb's "Seen and Heard International," October 2006

"James Matheson’s Pound opens with a soft repeated note that grows like a beast, forming a kind of rhythmic spine, with whorls of accented notes that dance around it in a concept that only grows more chilling in its relentlessness. Eric Huebner, who was so expert in the Ligeti Piano Concerto last season, seemed doggedly immersed in the pummeling rhythmic patterns that only grow more and more fiendish."

   - Bruce Hodges

From Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 30, 2007

"So, too, was Buzz an infectious work for violin, clarinet, cello and piano by James Matheson. It was an amped-up tribute to Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Flight of the Bumble Bee," and its first few notes themselves were turned into a persistent buzzing bee. Pianist Daniel Spiegle was especially impressive playfully articulating it."

  - Andrew Druckenbrod

From American Record Guide, July - August, 2003:

On Colonnade: "[A] substantial and weighty score . . .

"First [on the program] was James Matheson's Colonnade, inspired by the enormous white marble columns of the New York State Education Building. Ingeniously looking past (or through) the immensity of the building's facade, Matheson delivered an iridescent, almost wispy composition that depicted many layers of light and shadow."

   - Joseph Dalton

From The New York Times, January 17, 2004:

"James Matheson's Buzz (2001) made the most of the instrumentation [. . .], dividing the ensemble interestingly, with the clarinet and violin combining in a mercurial counterbalance to the weightier cello and piano writing. . . [I]t is accessible and eclectic."

   - Allan Kozinn

From The Free Times ( Columbia, SC), January 21-27, 2004:

"Matheson and Adès are in their 30s and are formidable in their talent and promise. Both already have taken major prizes. The closing work, Matheson's Buzz, contained flawless prestissimo virtuosity that made the whole evening a prize."

   - David Lowry

From The LA Weekly, December 19-25, 2003:

"The program’s second half had newer music and newer ideas. Antares is a lively bunch; [. . .] a lovable James Matheson trifle called Buzz brought things to life on both sides of the stage."

   - Alan Rich

From the New Yorker, September, 2001:

"James Matheson . . . [is] an early thirty-something American composer who is ignoring style labels and writing synthetic, satisfying music that avoids the glib theatricality of postmodernism.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 10, 2003:

"But the centerpiece of the weekend's program was the first performance of James Matheson's The Paces: Concerto for Piano and Chamber Ensemble, with pianist Charles Abramovic as its masterly soloist. Matheson, born in 1970, studied with Gerald Levinson at Swarthmore College, and later with Steven Stucky and Roberto Sierra. His new piece (commissioned by Swarthmore's Gilmore and Mary Roelofs Stott Fund) is stylistically unusual. For one thing, it isn't afraid to be quiet. For another, it does not fear beauty. Think about how unusual that is among new works today.

"Its form is, loosely, theme and variations, starting with a shapely melody, and going on to explore one lovely harmony after another. It is dissonant, but doles out dissonance in carefully calculated doses.

"Most impressive, it always makes the unobvious aesthetic choice. It is prone to turn a melody in an unexpected direction, or color a harmony with a subtle surprise. All in all, no composers today aim for this kind of music - calm, confidently unresolved - except the French.

"The piano gets an extended solo section that acts, spiritually, as the piece's cadenza, and, rather than becoming the usual chance for virtuosity, it once again defies what the ears expect. In it, Matheson gives the concerto its most achingly tender moments."

   - Peter Dobrin

From the San Diego Reader, June 5, 2003:

"The music of James Matheson, born in 1970 and living in New York, is happily free of the heavy academic orthodoxy that stifled serious music during the long decades when Webernian serialism was the key to respectability (although not, of course, to popularity). For Matheson, tonality is always a possibility; but it is a matter of feeling, not of architecture, and it can be used or not used, depending on the momentary expressive needs of the music. Dissonance is not dictated by any abstract principle, but is employed for emotional expression, as is--with equal freedom--consonance. Form is guided by intuition, not by any externally imposed system; nevertheless, the composer's focus on a central motivic or textural idea, imaginatively yet lucidly varied, insures that the listener can sense the work's unity. Matheson loves the play of instrumental timbres, but they are always in the service of a human reality that the music is giving voice to.

"Thus, in the six-and-a-half minutes of Buzz, the obsessive flutterings and scurryings over brooding, slow-moving harmonies evoked in a phantasmagoric way the immediate energies and underlying sadness of life, the "buzz" of activity struggling to overcome the inexorable laws of existence, but unable to silence them. (Both the idea and the form the composer gives it may show the influence of Ives's The Unanswered Question.)

"The same kinds of serious concerns, and the same inventiveness in finding musical means to embody them, dominate other Matheson works. His stunning River, River, River, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony, magically communicates the essence of an exquisite little symbolist poem by T.S. Eliot about a Virginia river on a hot summer day, the scarcely perceptible movement of the water suggesting the flow of time suspended in a moment of timeless consciousness. The piano trio Falling is a set of variations on a descending sequence, with once again a variously agitated and somber emotional atmosphere: the fevered assertiveness of activity (including the scurrying gestures that permeate Buzz) pitted against inevitable decline and degeneration.

"The hypnotic power of this music arises from a moment-to-moment drama that fascinates the mind and creates its own unpredictable structure. This is what one experiences in Matheson's incredibly beautiful Gliss, an orchestral work, with its gradual evolution of basic melodic shapes within gorgeous clouds of shifting timbres; in Sleep, a concerto for violin and chamber orchestra, with its rich harmonies and textures and its profound expressiveness; and in Spin, a compact string quartet in which texture and gesture are the generative elements, but where there is still a pervasive sense of singing melody and evocative harmony. These works, and others, are available for listening--along with the composer's extensive and eloquent program notes--on Matheson's website. I urge you to take advantage of it, if you want to become acquainted with a truly impressive contemporary composer."

   - Jonathan Saville

From the Albany Times Union, March 6, 2003:

"Prior to writing [Colonnade,], the 32-year-old James Matheson visited Albany and toured the grand State Education Building, located across from the Capitol. The building was dedicated in 1912 and features the longest series of columns in the United States.

"'The most important aspects of the building for me,' the composer explains, 'are of course the colonnade, which lines the front of the building, the rotunda -- which is covered with murals -- and an amazing room off the rotunda ... that has Guastavino vaulted ceilings.'

"Processing these influences, Matheson composed a work in an arched (or A-B-A) form. 'The facade was sort of the basic structural idea for the first and third sections,' he says. 'The middle section is sort of big and open and airy, and the lines are arched. So this sort of reflects the vaulted ceilings inside, reflective of this big, open music with arch-like lines.'

"Matheson wouldn't be finding the success he's already gaining at such a young age if his musical ideas were obvious or unimaginative -- so don't expect the columns to be depicted with heavy pounding chords in regular succession.

"'The column idea is more varied; it's a sort of a rising figure,' he explains. 'It's treated in a more complex way than repeated notes. If you don't know that it's about a colonnade, it might never be suggested to you.'"

From Sequenza21, May 5-12, 2003:

"According to composer James Matheson, the title of The Paces: Concerto for Piano and Chamber Ensemble (2003) plays on the meaning of a set of tests, as well as the rate of change, as phrases progress through their variations on the opening theme. The piece begins calmly and simply with piano, then flute, but strings bring an edginess as the piano grows more complex. Yet each phrase opens with a familiar repetitive progression. The composer said he wanted to give the piano soloist "as much to chew on as possible," and judging by the experience of Charles Abramovic, he is the right person for the challenge.

"Paces also refers to the metronomic beat of the chase in one section accompanying a march-like rhythm for the piano; the following section is a contrasting slow creep. This is really just a simple theme and variations, contrasting hot and cold, smooth and rough, loud and soft, fast and slow, in unpredictable patterns."