BIOGRAPHY
Matthew is Principal Trombone with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Aurora Orchestra and the brass septet Septura. He is also on the teaching faculty at the Royal Academy of Music in London and is an active soloist.
His passion for the trombone has driven him to release three solo albums Paradiso e inferno, Matthew Gee’s Amazing Sliding Circus and most recently Schubert’s Winter Journey also on Naxos.
Matthew has performed with orchestras and ensembles all over the world, including the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra,Klangforum Wein, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, theLondon Symphony Orchestra, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and has recorded and appeared in many films and television scores.
After studying Music at King’s College London and the Royal College of Music, Matthew took up the position of Section Principal trombone with the Orchestra of Scottish Opera. After a brief stint with the Orquesta Filharmónica de Santiago (Chile) he then returned to the UK to join the Orchestra of Opera North. Further study saw Matthew attend the Hochschule der Künste, Bern, where he was awarded the Eduard Tschumi award for gaining the highest mark in the competitive soloists diploma course.
As a soloist Matthew has performed internationally and has had a number of works written for him, most notablyCircus Games and Trombone Sonata by Rob Keeley, and Fischietto è morto by Gary Carpenter. He gave the U.K. Première of Kurt Schwertsik’s Trombone Concerto at St. Johns’, Smith Square and is currently having a concerto written for him by Welsh composer Bernard Kane. He has performed and taken masterclasses at many festivals, including those in Melbourne, Wellington, New York, Sarajevo, Lieksa (Finland), Isla Verde (Argentina) and Beijing. Concerto performances include works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Buxton Orr, Derek Bourgeois, Ferdinand David, Johann Albrechtsberger and Luciano Berio’s demanding concerto Solo in the beautiful Konzerthaus in Bern.
He is President of the British Trombone Society and takes an active part in promoting the trombone and developing its repertoire. Matthew is a Getzen artist.
The trombones of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have designed an online course, taking an in-depth at the skills needed to play in a professional orchestra. A couple of times a year we run a Trombone BOOTCAMP, a live course looking at everything from orchestral playing to fundamentals and maintenance routines. We also offer a purely online course which you can complete at your leisure. Section Playing Success 101 is a modular course and focuses on three different composers: Richard Strauss, Wolfgang Mozart and John Williams. Each module consists of a Composer Focus (a video explaining how a particular composer writes for trombones), a video of the RPO trombones playing and working on a piece by that composer (a sort of behind-the-scenes insight showing how a professional section works on a piece) and Playalong tracks, allowing students to replace anyone one of us in the section and play along with the rest of the RPO trombones. The focus is on core pieces of the RPO repertoire in which the trombones feature prominently, including Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8, Schumann’s Symphony No. 3, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Superman, Mozart Requiem, Heldenleben and Also Sprach Zarathustra.
The course content is hosted on Teachable, so simply click on either photo, sign up and away you go.
TEACHING
Matthew has been part of the teaching faculty of London’s Royal Academy of Music in 2012. He dedicates an ever-increasing amount of time to trombone students and their education through one-to-one teaching, masterclasses and clinics. Trombone pedagogy forms an important part of his own study and he strives to develop this part of his portfolio over the future. He is regularly invited to brass festivals across the world to teach and inspire the next generation of young brass players, in places such as Melbourne, Wellington (NZ), New York, Sarajevo, Finland, Argentina and China.
