Matthew Curtis (composer)

Matthew Curtis was born in Cumbria, England in 1959. He is essentially self-taught as a composer and orchestrator. While he was a student at Worcester College, Oxford reading Classics, his work, including a symphony,[1] first began to receive public performance.[2]

On leaving university he was introduced to the late Alan Owen, a composer and BBC radio staff producer, who took an interest in his music. This led to numerous broadcasts of his work from 1982 onward in the UK, notably BBC Radio,[3] and in several other countries.[4] In 2001 he came to the notice of the composer and record producer Philip Lane, resulting in a significant discography and over 8 hours of music recorded.[lower-alpha 1]

His music has been played in concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra[5] and I Musici de Montréal.[6] and by several non-professional and youth orchestras, most notably the National Children's Orchestras of Great Britain, for which he has composed a number of pieces.[7] Curtis was commissioned to compose for the English Music Festival[8] in 2008, and his Festival Overture opened the final concert of the event.

Curtis is probably best known for his short orchestral pieces in the British light music tradition (he has been seen as part of the "renaissance" of British Light Music[9] and singled out for praise in an article in The Spectator among other things discussing the neglect of light classical music[10]), but his output extends to more substantial works for orchestra, chamber music, songs and choral works. Reviews of his work in Gramophone,[11] on MusicWeb International,[2] an extensive review of his early work by the British Music Society,[12] and other reviews of recordings devoted to his orchestral works in the British Composer Series[13][14] all draw attention to his emphasis on and mastery of melody and orchestral colouring, and make stylistic references to Edward Elgar, Eric Coates and Haydn Wood among others.

A showcase of his work was given on 21 September 2018 at the Hastings and Bexhill International Composers Festival.