Matthew Kaner

Born in London, composer Matthew Kaner studied Music at King’s College London and Composition with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where he now works as a professor.
Matthew has composed works for the London Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia, members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Workers Union, Siglo de Oro, King’s College London Choir and Orfea amongst others, and soloists including Richard Uttley, Julia Samojlo and Sam Corkin. His music has been performed at various venues in the UK and abroad, including Seiji Ozawa Hall, the Barbican, the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, St. John’s Smith Square, the Purcell Room, LSO St. Luke’s and SnapeMaltings. It has also been broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and featured in the Aldeburgh, Norfolk & Norwich, City of London and Victoria International Music Festivals.
In the summer of 2012 Matthew was the Margaret Lee Crofts Fellow in Composition at the Tanglewood Music Center, Massachusetts, where he worked and studied with composers George Benjamin, John Harbison, Oliver Knussen and Michael Gandolfi. He attended the Britten-Pears Contemporary Composition course in 2011. In 2013, he was one of the winners of the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize and was consequently commissioned to write Mosaic for the Philharmonia’s Music of Today series, premiered in the Royal Festival Hall in May 2014. He was also the recipient of a LondonSinfonietta Writing the Future chamber commission in the same year; his quartet for flute, clarinet, viola and cello, Chants, was premiered in the Purcell Room as part of the New Music Day in December 2013.
Matthew was the 2013 Composer-in-Association with the Workers Union, composing a work with electronics entitled Organum which they premiered with the support of the PRS for Music Foundation, culminating in a final performance at LSO St. Luke’s in November 2013. His commission for the London Symphony Orchestra, The Calligrapher’s Manuscript, was premiered under the baton of Robin Ticciati in the Barbican Hall in September 2013 and received with critical acclaim.
He was recently the winner of a Roche Young Commission, for which he will write a new large-scale orchestral work for performance in the Lucerne Festival in 2017.