Matthew King (composer, born 1967)


Matthew King is a British composer, pianist, and educator. His works include opera, piano and chamber music, and choral and orchestral pieces. He has been 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 has a YouTube channel called 'The Music Professor'.

Operas

Several of King's pieces incorporate a community component, combining amateurs and young people with professionals.
King's first chamber opera, The Snow Queen, was composed for the British soprano Jane Manning and her virtuoso ensemble Jane's Minstrels. The Snow Queen was described by one reviewer as "music of distinctive beauty with disarming theater sense."
The opera Jonah, with a libretto by Michael Irwin (author), was commissioned by the Canterbury Festival and first produced in Canterbury Cathedral in 1996; the dramatic cantata Gethsemane was premiered by Florilegium at the Spitalfields Festival in 1998; the Brunel (opera project), featured on BBC Radio 4's Setting Brunel to Music in October 2003.
The community opera On London Fields, and winner of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2005, was described by Stephen Pettitt in the Evening Standard as "unafraid of complexity, even when writing for very young performers. Some of the clashing rhythms and textural layerings are mind-boggling.".
The cantata Hear our Voice was premiered in London, Nuremberg and Prague in 2006.
The chamber opera Das Babylon Experiment was produced in Nuremberg in 2008.
King's experimental cantata, Schoenberg in Hollywood, premiered in Guildhall School of Music and Drama's Milton Court concert hall in 2015. His comic faux-Baroque cantata Il Pastoral, urbanology e il Suburbano was first performed at Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh in 2015. King's chamber opera The Pied Piper was first produced at Stour Music Festival in 2015, with the British countertenor Michael Chance in the title role. The Pied Piper was subsequently revived in a new revision with German translation in productions in Salzburg and Nuremberg in 2018. Matthew King has also made chamber orchestra reorchestrations of several of Wagner's operas.

Instrumental works

Matthew King has composed a variety of instrumental works. His Robert Schumann in Three Pieces was recorded by the Avenue A ensemble. King has composed two string quartets, both premiered by the Fitzwilliam String Quartet. His orchestral work Totentango was first performed in 2010 by the London Symphony Orchestra. His 'Hitchcockian tone poem’ called Velocity, for ensemble, chorus and big band, was premiered by the Aurora Orchestra in 2011. Blue, a rhapsody for piano and chamber orchestra, was written in 2011 for the Savant pianist Derek Paravicini, with whom Matthew King had previously improvised on BBC Radio 4 in 2009. In 2018 King composed a new three-movement piano concerto for Derek Paravicini, which premiered at the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, conducted by Michael Francis (conductor). Matthew King's orchestral piece Richard Wagner in Venice: a Symphony is an elaboration of sketches made by Richard Wagner before his death in Venice in 1883.
King has experimented with unusual combinations of instruments and unconventional performing environments. The King's Wood Symphony, for multiple horns, percussion, and an electronic score by Nye Parry, the work utilizes the harmonic spectra of natural horns and electronically altered horn sounds calling to each other across a vast performing space. King's Wood Symphony also gave rise to two chamber works, a trio for violin, horn and piano, and a nonet of horns with electronics, both premiered in the Wigmore Hall in 2007. A community project in 2008 produced the Odyssean Variations, premiered by the British cellist Natalie Clein and an orchestra of young musicians from the London Borough of Hackney, at LSO St Luke's in London. Una Piccolo Sinfonia is a miniature symphony in three movements for an ensemble of nine piccolos.
King embarked on a series of increasingly political protest pieces, including Fix This for piano, violin, cello, electric guitar and two percussionists, first performed at the Royal Northern College of Music. Fix This references theme tunes and catchphrases associated with Jimmy Savile.

Piano works

As part of his doctoral research into the experimental creative application of sonata form in contemporary piano composition, Matthew King composed more than 45 single-movement piano sonatas between 2019 and 2023. This cycle explored a variety of topics including Hildegard of Bingen, Scarlatti, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Erik Satie, Venice, Duke Ellington, David Bowie, Bernard Herrman, Federico Mompou, Italian Opera, Irish Folk Music, Morton Feldman, Derek Jarman and Bill Evans, among others. King's piano miniature Sonatas takes a minute to perform and contains a succession of 32 bars, quoting all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in chronological order.

Educator

From 1998 to 2001, King was head of composition at the Yehudi Menuhin School and is professor of composition at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He has led workshops for Hackney Music Development Trust, and for Bridging Arts in Salzburg; he guest-leads the Wigmore Study Group at the Wigmore Hall in London. He has presented programmes on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3.

Selected works