Colin Matthews was born in London in 1946. He studied music at the Universities of Nottingham and Sussex, where he also taught, and subsequently worked with Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh from 1972 - 6, and with Imogen Holst. He collaborated with Deryck Cooke for many years on the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. Since the early 1970s his music, ranging from solo piano music through three string quartets and many ensemble and orchestral works, has been played widely both in the UK and worldwide, with recordings on Unicorn, Collins Classics and Deutsche Grammophon. From 1992-9 he was Associate Composer with the London Symphony Orchestra, writing amongst other works a Cello Concerto for Rostropovich. In 1997 his choral/orchestral Renewal, commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of BBC Radio 3, was given the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for large-scale composition. His ballet score Hidden Variables opened the Royal Ballet's season in December 1999, and the large-scale ensemble piece Continuum was toured in Europe by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Sir Simon Rattle in Autumn 2000. He is currently Composer-in-Association with the Hallé Orchestra and is completing a series of orchestrations of Debussy’s Preludes. His orchestral work Reflected Images was premiered in October 2003 by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas, and he is writing a piece for cello and orchestra (Jan Vogler and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra) to be performed at the reopening of the Dresden Frauenkirche in November 2005.

April 2005

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