Having chaired the panel for the recent International Trombone Competition in Lieksa, I feel it is important to offer some words of explanation regarding the decision not to award the first prize. Winning a major international competition can be huge boost to a player’s profile. But only one player can win, and for most competitors [...]
As I predicted in week one, there has been a bit of a delay in writing this post - five weeks to be precise. The relentless pace of the year continued with touring, teaching, arranging, festivals, RPO and Septura all bubbling along without a moments rest. However, crowbar’ed into a Tuesday morning was the first [...]
Strictly speaking this is not week four, more like five or six, but after an intense period of work on Winter Journey, life got busy and the project had to go on the back-burner. Working as a professional musician in London is an extreme existence at times, and one such patch had crept up on [...]
Most of this week has been spent touring Italy and Switzerland with the RPO. There are often rather a lot of distractions when on tour, especially when friends (colleagues) are intent on finding fun no matter how gruelling the schedule. However, opportunities still present for work on Winter Journey (as I am now referring to [...]
Studying in Bern necessitated a number of years of German lessons, so I am not totally out of my depth with the language, but far from fluent. Translations are of course easy to come by, but a really useful source is Lois Phillips Lieder line by line. It is with this by my side that [...]
Given the oppressive, freezing conditions in which we recorded my last disc, I was keen to make sure any future recordings were held in the summer months. So the first job was to find a venue and dates that worked for me, Christopher Glynn (piano), Jim Unwin (producer and engineer) and Matt Knight (assistant in [...]
With the dust not yet settled on my last solo disc 'Matthew Gee's Amazing Sliding Circus', it is with fresh trepidation that I jump headfirst into another project: Schubert's Winterreise. This has been bubbling away for a couple of years now, and with Naxos on board to deliver the disc, it is finally time to put [...]