Described by Judith Weir, Master of the Queen’s Music, as “one of Britain’s most adventurous composers, utterly skilled, imaginative and resourceful”, Matthew King’s recent works include an ongoing sequence of more than 20 single-movement piano sonatas since 2019; a piano concerto, premiered in San Diego in June 2018; the orchestral lament, A Hero Passes, premiered in Canterbury Cathedral in 2018; two music theatre pieces with the librettist Alasdair Middleton: Il Pastorale, l’Urbano e il Suburbano, premiered at Aldeburgh in 2015, and Schoenberg in Hollywood, premiered in Milton Court Concert Hall in 2015. Matthew King’s chamber opera The Snow Queen has been produced many times since its premiere in 1992, most recently in Ljubljana in 2019 – 2020, and his chamber opera The Pied Piper was revived in 2018 in Salzburg and Nuremberg. His ‘Hitchcockian tone-poem’ Velocity was premiered by the Aurora Orchestra in 2012, and his Totentango was first performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2010. Reviewers have described his music as “exhilarating” (The Sunday Times), “teeming with ideas…with a jauntiness of rhythm and texture” (The Times), and possessing “distinctive beauty with disarming theatre sense” (Independent on Sunday). Matthew King is Professor of Composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
