Cello playing is at the centre of Matthew Barley’s career, while his musical world has virtually no geographical, social or stylistic boundaries. After training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Moscow Conservatoire, Matthew’s activities in performance, improvisation, cross-disciplinary projects, composition, and pioneering community programmes soon developed to form a uniquely eclectic international career. The best representation of this career so far was Matthew’s marathon UK tour, On The Road, in 2006 playing 20 recitals and giving 17 workshops in 30 days. The venues ranged from prestigious concert halls, to a prison, a school for terminally ill children, and a vegetarian cafe. The programme included improvisation, core classical music, contemporary music with electronics, and a new piece by DJ Bee and Barley for cello with computer and midi-pedal board! The tour was a huge critical and audience success with many sold-out houses.
Matthew made an early London concerto debut playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto in the Barbican Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra, as finalist of the LSO-Shell Competition. Since then his solo and chamber music engagements have taken him to nearly 50 countries, performing repertoire ranging from Bach to his own compositions, music written for him and improvisation. Matthew’s concerto engagements have included the BBC Philharmonic and BBC Scottish Symphony (Hazlewood), BBC Concert, Gürzenich (Markus Stenz), Royal Scottish National (Marin Alsop), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, London Chamber Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Melbourne Symphony (Tortelier), New Zealand Symphony (Tan Dun), London Sinfonietta, Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia, Brno Philharmonic, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Buenos Aires Philharmonic, Zagreb Soloists, and Athens Kamerata. Recent recital appearances include the Wigmore Hall, St George’s Bristol, Seoul’s Kumho Hall, as well as the Krakow, Lucerne, City of London, Spitalfields, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi, Prague Autumn, Hong Kong, St Magnus in Orkney, Harrogate, Cheltenham, WOMAD, New Zealand, Lanaudiere and London Jazz festivals.
His Europe-wide tour with the Netherlands Dans Theatre, as on-stage soloist in Brett Dean’s cello and electronics score for Jiri Kylian’s ballet One of a Kind, took him to 5 different countries with 17 performances including London Sadler’s Wells, Montpellier Danse Festival, and The Hague’s Dans Theater.
Matthew’s passion for new music has led him to premiere works, many of them his commissions, by Detlev Glanert, Peter Wiegold, Fraser Trainer, Rand Steiger, John Metcalfe, John Woolrich, Dimitri Smirnov, Carl Vine, Katsuhiro Tsubono and Deidre Gribben.
Matthew Barley’s non-classical collaborations include Julian Joseph, Django Bates, Sultan Khan, Davud Azad, DJ Bee, Talvin Singh, Temple of Sound and Ross Daly, appearing in venues ranging from Ronnie Scotts to the South Bank Centre. Matthew also masterminded and performed in a major project for violinist Viktoria Mullova, Through the Looking Glass. The project was performed in a 27-concert worldwide tour, and the recording, produced by Matthew, was released by Philips Classics in 2000. Matthew’s ongoing collaboration with star Indian sarod player Amjad Ali Khan, has resulted in duo recitals at London’s Royal Festival Hall (2000 and 2002), at the 2003 WOMAD Festivals in Adelaide (Australia), Wellington (New Zealand) and Reading (UK), at the St Denis Festival in Paris, as well as in Calcutta and Mumbai in India. They will soon be performing Amjad Ali Khan’s double concerto for Sarod and Cello with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Matthew’s first recital disc, Reminding, featuring Soviet music for cello and piano, was released on Quartz in September 2005. Previous recording projects include The Silver Swan (Black Box) and Strings Attached (Navras). The Silver Swan features repertoire ranging from plainchant to Bach, Bizet and Arvo Pärt, arranged by Matthew for multi-track cello, creating an extraordinary consort effect. Strings Attached is a collaboration with sarod players Amjad Ali Khan, Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan. It was recorded live in concerts at London’s Festival Hall and in Calcutta, and is also available as a DVD.
Matthew’s pioneering approach to education, community music and training orchestral players is now internationally renowned. His work as a trainer of orchestral players, which focuses on the use of improvisation and interactive performance in the context of the orchestra’s outreach and education activities, has included the Philharmonia, LPO, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Melbourne and Sydney Symphonies, Tampere Philharmonic (Finland), Brussels Opera and Malaysia Philharmonic orchestras, as well as the Nyyd Ensemble in Estonia and the Sun City Ensemble in Japan. In education Matthew has led major projects all around the world with enormous success working in this area very closely with the British Council.
In 1997 Matthew founded Between the Notes, a performance and education group who work with music and other arts. BTN has been involved in major projects at the Lichfield Festival (The Titanic in 1997 and Journeys in 1998 – Journeys was also made into a documentary by the National Film and Television School), which consisted of ten days of workshops involving up to 50 teenagers, culminating in a public performance as part of the festival’s main programme. They have appeared at the Sydney Opera House, London’s Royal Opera House (with the Royal Ballet), the International Symposium of Contemporary Music in Hong Kong, and on tour in Bangladesh, Cyprus (in the basketball stadium to 4000 people with 1000 performers to mark the occasion of Cyprus joining the EU), Greece, Spain, Germany (performances in the Cologne Philharmonic of Fraser Trainer’s concerto for BTN and orchestra), Norway, Croatia, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belgium. The group has just led Invisible Lines, a nationwide education and performance culminating in a performance in the Royal Albert Hall at the BBC Proms, recorded live on BBC TV. Their first album, Knots (Quartz), has been released in May 2005, and the second, Extraordinary Improvisations (FMR) in June 2007
Future plans include concertos with the Lanaudiere Festival Orchestra and the Nederlands Radio Symphony, a residency at the prestigious new Kings Place in London, a series of CD releases for Signum Records (first of these is a duo album with Julian Joseph out in September 2009). Late 2009 sees the launch of the Matthew Barley Ensemble, a group of vitruoso young players who also improvise, and will be artist in residence at the Spitalfields Festival in 2011.
Future collaborations include projects with Viktorai Mullova (to whom Matthew is married), Matthias Goerne, Martin Frost, Viviane Hagner, Thomas Larcher and Kit Armstrong, jazz pianist Julian Joseph and Iranian Sufi Davod Azad.
2007 saw Matthew’s debut on television as the Music Director and presenter of BBC 2’s widely acclaimed ‘Classical Star’.