Colin Matthews

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Colin Matthews (born February 13, 1946) is a British composer of classical music.

Matthews was born in London in 1946; his older brother is the composer David Matthews. He read classics at the University of Nottingham, and then studied composition there with Arnold Whittall and Nicholas Maw. In the 1970s he taught at the University of Sussex, where he obtained a doctorate for his work on Mahler, an offshoot of his long collaboration with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. During this period he also worked at Aldeburgh with Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst.

In 1975 his orchestral Fourth Sonata won the Scottish National Orchestra's Ian Whyte Award. Subsequent orchestral works include the widely performed Night Music (1976), Sonata No. 5: Landscape (1977-81), and a First Cello Concerto, commissioned by the BBC for the 1984 Proms: these last two have been recorded by Unicorn-Kanchana. In 1989 Cortège was given its first performance by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Bernard Haitink, and Quatrain by the London Symphony Orchestra and Michael Tilson Thomas. This was the first of a series of LSO commissions, followed by Machines and Dreams for their 1991 Childhood Festival, Memorial in 1993 with Mstislav Rostropovich as conductor, and a Second Cello Concerto for Rostropovich in 1996. Matthews was Associate Composer with the LSO from 1992 until 1999. The orchestral version of Hidden Variables was a joint commission for the LSO and the New World Symphony Orchestra, who gave the American première in Miami under Michael Tilson Thomas in 1992; in the same year the Cleveland Orchestra gave the American première of Machines and Dreams. Collins Classics released a CD of Matthews' LSO commissions in 1996 to celebrate his 50th birthday.

The BBC commission Broken Symmetry was first performed by its dedicatees, the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen, in March 1992, and repeated at the 1992 Proms. It was recorded in 1994, together with the Fourth Sonata and Suns Dance, by Deutsche Grammophon (a Grammy Award nomination); and it forms the third part of the huge choral/orchestral Renewal, commissioned by the BBC for the 50th anniversary of Radio 3 in September 1996. Renewal received the 1997 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for large-scale composition. The Dutch première of Cortège was given in December 1998 by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly. The ballet score Hidden Variables, incorporating a new orchestral work, Unfolded Order, was commissioned by the Royal Ballet for the reopening of the Royal Opera House in December 1999.

Colin Matthews' chamber music includes three string quartets, two oboe quartets, a Divertimento for double string quartet (1982), and a substantial body of piano music. Between 1985 and 1994 he completed six major works for ensemble: Suns Dance for the London Sinfonietta (1985, reworked for the Royal Ballet as Pursuit), Two Part Invention (l987), The Great Journey (1981-88) — recently re-released on NMC — Contraflow, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta for the 1992 Huddersfield Festival, and two commissions for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Hidden Variables (1989) and ...through the glass (1994), the latter given its first performance under Simon Rattle, who also conducted it in 1998 at the Proms and in Salzburg. Matthews' music was featured at the Almeida Festival in 1988, at the Bath Festival in 1990, at Tanglewood in 1988, and in 1991, when he was visiting composer and teacher, at the 1998 Suntory Summer Festival in Tokyo, at the 2003 Avanti! Festival in Finland, and the 2004 Berlin Festival.

The year 2000 saw four major premières: Two Tributes for the London Sinfonietta; Pluto, an addition to Holst's Planets, for the Hallé Orchestra and Kent Nagano, already widely performed; Aftertones, for the Huddersfield Choral Society; and Continuum, a large-scale work for soprano and ensemble commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group for Cynthia Clarey and Simon Rattle, with performances in London, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, Vienna and Birmingham. In the spring of 2001 the Philharmonia orchestra gave the first performance of Matthews' Horn Concerto, with Richard Watkins and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Also in 2001 he was commissioned to write a Fanfare to open the BBC Proms. Reflected Images, for Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, received its première in October 2003.

Colin Matthews was appointed Associate Composer with the Hallé Orchestra from October 2001, and he is writing a number of works for them, as well as a project involving the orchestration of all 24 of Debussy's Preludes. Future commissions include works for the Concertgebouw, New York Philharmonic and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestras. He is active as administrator of the Holst Foundation, Chairman of the Britten Estate, and trustee of the Britten-Pears Foundation. He was a Council Member of the Aldeburgh Foundation from 1983 to 1994, and retains close links with the Aldeburgh Festival and the Britten-Pears School, particularly as co-director with Oliver Knussen of the Contemporary Composition and Performance Course. He was a member of the Council of the Society for the Promotion of New Music for over 20 years, and a director of the Performing Right Society from 1992 to 1995. He is founder and Executive Producer of NMC Recordings, and has also produced recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Virgin, Conifer, Collins, Bridge, BMG, Continuum, Metronome and Elektra Nonesuch (Górecki's Third Symphony, for which he received a Grammy nomination).

In 1998 Colin Matthews was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Nottingham. He is currently Prince Consort Professor of Music at the Royal College of Music, a Governor of the Royal Northern College of Music, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Composition at the University of Manchester.