Matthus’s Fantasy World Deserves a Wider Audience
Siegfried Matthus—one suspects he gets tired of explaining he wasn’t named for Wagner’s hero—has been quietly building a substantial catalogue while the contemporary music world chases after shinier objects. This 1995 orchestral fantasy Das Land Phantásien, based on Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, arrives with modest ambitions and delivers something rather more interesting than its genre might suggest.
The narrator-and-orchestra format is well-trodden ground. We all know Peter and the Wolf, and some of us remember Poulenc’s L’Histoire de Babar with affection. But Matthus isn’t simply adding another entry to the children’s concert repertoire—though it could function perfectly well there. The score, performed here by the Bruckner Orchester Linz under Ingo Ingensand, reveals a composer unwilling to condescend. The orchestration is genuinely sophisticated, the harmonic language contemporary without being willfully difficult, and the thematic material… well, it actually sticks.
Listen to how Matthus handles the recurring motifs. They’re not the blunt-instrument leitmotifs of a pedagogical exercise. Instead, they undergo subtle transformation, reappearing in different instrumental guises—a horn call becomes a string meditation, a woodwind flutter expands into full orchestral commentary. The writing shows the same hand that produced his Cello Concerto and symphonies: taut, economical, with a keen ear for color. The music rarely doubles the narration in that Mickey Mouse way that makes so much of this repertoire tiresome. Matthus trusts his orchestra to comment, to contradict, to add layers of meaning.
Michael Heltau’s narration is idiomatic and engaging, though one wishes Berlin Classics had provided an English translation of the text in the liner notes. (They print the German, which helps if you’re following along, but Ende’s fantasy deserves accessibility.) The recording quality from the Brucknerhaus is superb—clean, spacious, with that slightly dry acoustic that serves contemporary scores well. You can hear individual lines clearly even in the denser passages.
The piece emerged from an interesting genesis. Kurt Masur apparently handed Matthus a copy of Ende’s book and suggested an opera. What we have here draws on material from that projected opera—or perhaps from a ballet score, the documentation is characteristically murky—but stands on its own as a fifty-minute orchestral fantasy. It’s more fragmentary than a symphonic poem, more unified than typical incidental music.
Does it need the narrator? Probably not, actually. The purely orchestral sections are strong enough to stand alone, and one could imagine a concert suite that would work beautifully. But Ende’s story provides a legitimate framework, and Matthus uses it intelligently rather than slavishly.
The Bruckner Orchester plays with commitment and precision. Ingensand keeps the narrative moving without rushing, allows the lyrical passages to breathe, and achieves a nice balance between narrator and orchestra. The strings have a pleasing warmth in their lower registers, the brass never overwhelms, and the percussion—quite active in this score—is articulated with clarity.
This is music that trusts its young audience to handle complexity while never forgetting that storytelling matters. Matthus writes with the same seriousness he brings to his concert works, and the result is a piece that adults can enjoy without feeling they’re slumming. One hopes for an English-language album eventually—the piece deserves wider circulation. Until then, this Berlin Classics disc makes a strong case for Matthus as a composer who knows how to communicate without compromising his musical language. Highly recommended, and not just for families.
