Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is also a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert.
He read classics at the University of Nottingham, and then studied composition there with Arnold Whittall, and at the same time with Nicholas Maw.
In 1975 his orchestral Fourth Sonata (written 1974–75)[2] won the Scottish National Orchestra's Ian Whyte Award.
It was recorded in 1994, together with the Fourth Sonata and Suns Dance, by Deutsche Grammophon (a Grammy Award nomination); and it forms the third part of the huge choral/orchestral Renewal, commissioned by the BBC for the 50th anniversary of Radio 3 in September 1996.
Between 1985 and 1994 he completed six major works for ensemble: Suns Dance for the London Sinfonietta (1985, reworked for the Royal Ballet as Pursuit), Two Part Invention (1987), The Great Journey (1981–88)—re-released on NMC—Contraflow, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta for the 1992 Huddersfield Festival, and two commissions for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Hidden Variables (1989) and ...through the glass (1994), the latter given its first performance under Simon Rattle, who also conducted it in 1998 at the Proms and in Salzburg.
The year 2000 saw four major premières: Two Tributes for the London Sinfonietta; Pluto, an addition to Holst's Planets, for the Hallé Orchestra and Kent Nagano, now widely performed; Aftertones, for the Huddersfield Choral Society; and Continuum, a large-scale work for soprano and ensemble commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group for Cynthia Clarey and Simon Rattle, with performances in London, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, Vienna and Birmingham.
In the spring of 2001 the Philharmonia orchestra gave the first performance of Matthews' Horn Concerto, with Richard Watkins and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Reflected Images, for Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, received its première in October 2003.
During this period he wrote a number of works for them, as well as a project involving the orchestration of all 24 of Debussy's Preludes, completed in May 2007 and recorded by Sir Mark Elder on the Hallé label.
[5] In 2014 he wrote Spiralling for Spira Mirabilis, The Pied Piper of Hamelin to words by Michael Morpurgo for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, and a Fifth String Quartet for the 75th anniversary of Tanglewood.
Music written during the lockdown period (2020 - 22) includes Mosaics for orchestra, first performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in May 2023; an arrangement for piano trio of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony commissioned by Leonidas Kavakos, YoYo Ma and Emanuel Ax and recorded by them in 2022; and an opera in collaboration with William Boyd, A Visit to Friends, for first performance at the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival.
He is active as administrator of the Holst Foundation, was Chair of the Britten Estate for many years, and is Music Director and Joint President of Britten-Pears Arts.