Colin Matthews, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year, is renowned as a leading British composer and orchestrator working across every major genre. Even into his eighth decade, Matthews has continued to grow artistically, with the February 2026 premiere of an Oboe Concerto from the London Symphony Orchestra, and, at the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival, his debut opera A Visit to Friends. Click here to listen to a Colin Matthews playlist.
Matthews has also created music for the dance stage. His first foray into ballet was Pursuit, choreographed by Ashley Page for The Royal Ballet in 1987. The score for the 25-minute ballet was an expanded version of Matthews’ ensemble work Suns Dance for the London Sinfonietta. The score, for sixteen players, is imbued with extraordinary, breathless energy, with its music subject to almost continuous variation and featuring several spectacular solos for contrabassoon, oboe, horn, and viola – vividly reflected in Page’s choreography. The work, showcasing the febrile, machinic, and dynamic dimension of Matthews’ musical imagination, was revived in 1990 by the Royal Ballet.
Matthews was reunited with Page and the Royal Ballet in 1999, reopening the house after its long hiatus with Hidden Variables, designed by Antony McDonald. The 26-minute piece combined the 13-minute title work for orchestra with a newly-commissioned score Unfolded Order, creating a work in two parts. Hidden Variables takes the form of a 13-minute scherzo that was originally created by Matthews to playfully explore, explode, and lampoon various trends in (then) contemporary music – the work is in an unwavering triplet time signature and very fast throughout. Unfolded Order is more restrained and muted in character, unwinding its intensity and eventually fading away. The music played up the more sensuous and lyrical aspect of Matthews’ imagination; “Page’s cast looked magnificently erotic and knowing”, wrote The Guardian.
The most recent appearance of Matthews’ music at The Royal Ballet was as a celebrated orchestrator. 2009’s Sensorium, choreographed by Alastair Marriott, took five of Debussy’s Préludes, previously orchestrated by Matthews for Mark Elder and the Hallé Orchestra. The sensuous, shimmering orchestral textures gave rise to a limpid neoclassical ballet for twelve dancers, conceived as a part of a programming celebrating one hundred years since the foundation of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes alongside The Firebird and Les Sylphides. Two couples had ten women as their companions, with Des pas sur la neige a mysterious pas-de-deux. “It is secretive”, wrote the Financial Times, “fascinatingly so, as we consider the outlines of duets and ensembles, their use of the score, their emotional as well as dynamic implications.”
For more information about Colin Matthews’ work please contact promotion@fabermusic.com