COLIN MATTHEWS was born in London in 1946. He studied with Arnold Whittall and Nicholas Maw; in the 1970s he was assistant to Benjamin Britten, and worked for many years with Imogen Holst. His collaboration with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony lasted from 1963 until its publication in 1975.
Over five decades his music has ranged from solo piano music through six string quartets and many ensemble and orchestral works. From 1992-9 he was Associate Composer with the LSO, writing amongst other works a Cello Concerto for Rostropovich. In 1997 his choral/orchestral Renewal, commissioned for the 50th anniversary of BBC Radio 3, was given a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.
Orchestral works since 2000 include Reflected Images for the San Francisco SO, Berceuse for Dresden for the New York Philharmonic, Turning Point for the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Traces Remain for the BBC SO.
Matthews was Composer-in-Association with the Hallé – for whom he completed his orchestrations of Debussy’s 24 Preludes in 2007 – from 2001-10. He is now the orchestra’s Composer Emeritus.
His Horn Concerto for Richard Watkins and the Philharmonia was first performed in 2001, the Violin Concerto for Leila Josefowicz and the CBSO premiered in 2009. In 2011 he completed works for the London Sinfonietta, City of London Sinfonia and Leipzig Gewandhaus. He wrote his 4th String Quartet, for the Elias Quartet, in 2012, and his 5th, for the Tanglewood Music Center, in 2015. Spiralling was written for Spira Mirabilis in 2014; The Pied Piper, a collaboration with Michael Morpurgo, was performed by the LPO in 2015. Three recent major vocal works are Spleen: A Land of Rain for the BCMG (2017), As time returns for the London Sinfonietta (2018) and Seascapes for the Nash Ensemble (2020). A large-scale orchestral work, Mosaics, was composed in 2020 and performed by the LSO in May 2023. He is currently working with William Boyd on an opera, A Visit to Friends, to be performed at the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival.
Matthews is Founder and Executive Producer of NMC Recordings, Executive Administrator of the Holst Foundation and Music Advisor and Joint President of Britten-Pears Arts. With Oliver Knussen he founded the Aldeburgh Composition Course in 1992, and he has been composition director of the LSO’s Panufnik Scheme since 2005. He holds honorary posts with the Universities of Nottingham and Manchester and is Prince Consort Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music.
Colin Matthews’ music is published by Faber Music