Matthew Barley Ensemble

Matthew Barley

Matthew Barley studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and at the Conservatory of Moscow. Finalist at the LSO-Shell competition, he made his debut in Shostakovich's Cello Concerto at the Barbican Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra.
In 1997, he founded Between the Notes (BTN), a group interested in all kind of arts, aiming at redefining the relationship between artists and their audience during performances. BTN has been involved in educational projects at the Lichfield Festival, through workshops for students leading to a final performance included in the festival program. They played at the Sydney Opera House, the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, the Royal Opera in London, the International Symposium of Contemporary Music in Hong Kong, and have toured in Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Germany, Norway, Croatia, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belgium. As a professor, Barley bases his teaching on improvisation and interaction.
As a soloist, he performed in over fifty countries interpreting a wide repertoire, from Bach to his own compositions. He played with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the philharmonic orchestras of Liverpool, Buenos Aires, Brno and the Czech Republic, the symphony orchestras of Melbourne, New Zealand and the BBC, the London and Hong Kong Sinfonietta, the International Orchestra of Italy, the Kamerata of Athens, the London Chamber Orchestra and the orchestra Gürzenich.
Barley regularly performs in recital at the Wigmore Hall, the St George's Bristol, the Kumho Hall in Seoul, and Lucerne, Istanbul, Krakow, Abu Dhabi, Prague, Hong Kong, Spitalfields, St Magnus in Orkney, Harrogate, Cheltenham and at the London Jazz Festival.
He is the initiator of alternative projects such as the On the road program, a mixture of improvised works, classics and creations for cello and electronic music that he interprets not only in concert halls but also in prisons, children's hospitals and cafés.
The artists with whom he has worked cover various musical genres. Among them there are Matthias Goerne, Martin Frost, Viviane Hagner, Thomas Larcher, Kit Armstrong, Amjad Ali Kha, Julian Joseph, Django Bates, Talvin Singh, Jon Lord, Sultan Khan, Kathryn Tickell and Nitin Sawhney, Amjad Ali Khan and Viktoria Mullova with whom he conceived the project Through the Looking Glass, presented on a world-wide tour of 27 concerts.
He created works of Detlev Glatnert, Peter Wiegold, Fraser Trainer, Rand Steiger, John Metcalfe, John Woolrich, Dimitri Smirnov, Carl Vine, Katsuhiro Tsubono and Deidre Gribben, most of which were commissioned by himself or created for the Dans Theater Ballet in the Netherlands.
During his career, he has recorded many works released by Quartz, FMR and Signum.

Paul Clarvis

English percussionist, born in London in 1963, he works with well-known ensembles and classical orchestras as well as with prominent rock and pop celebrities such as Mick Jagger, Nina Simone, Steve Swallow and Paul McCartney.
At the BBC Proms, in 1996, he performed as a soloist conducted by of Sir Harrison Birtwhistle. From 1998 to 2001 he was president of the jury of the percussionist rehearsals for the BBC competition Young Musician of the Year.
Paul Clarvis recorded numerous soundtracks, including Star Wars, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, Lord of the Rings, Spy Games, Shakespeare in Love, James Bond, Billy Elliot and The Dark Knight.
He is one of the conductors of the Orchestra Mahatma, specialized in improvisation on popular arias, and professor of percussions at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
He has recorded many albums with different artists, such as Michel Legrand, Gordon Beck, Brian Ferry, Marc Ribot, Sam Rivers, Richard Thompson, The Orb, John Adams and Mark Anthony Turnage.

Julian Joseph

Born in 1966, he is one of the few jazz pianists to venture into the repertoire of classical music. In particular, he is the first jazz musician to be invited to a series of concerts at the Wigmore Hall.
He is frequently invited to several festivals, notably together with his trio Electric Band and his quartet Forum Project. As a soloist, he played sonatas by Bartók and Prokofiev, and the Piano Concerto in F by Gershwin with many symphony orchestras through Europe. He also took part in the Through the Looking Glass classical project, by Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley.
In 2007, he was commissioned by the London Festival to create an opera, Bridgetower: A Fable of 1807, on a libretto by Mike Phillips. Before that, from 2000 to 2007, he had been presenting the radio show Jazz Legends on BBC Radio 3, as well as several other TV shows dedicated to jazz music on Meridian TV and Sky TV. In 2006, he was awarded the Best Presenter at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards.
In 1991 he recorded his first album, The Language of Truth, and since then, he made four other albums, including duets for piano by Milhaud, Stravinsky and Poulenc with Marcelo Bratke.

Sam Walton

Sam Walton studied the percussions and the timpani at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he was awarded the Queen's prize, the James Blades prize, and obtained the scholarship Zildjian.
In 1996, he won the BBC Young musicians competition in the category of percussions, and participated in the final concert, also broadcast on television. In the same year he won the bronze medal in the Shell / London Symphony Orchestra competition.
As a Percussionist and timpanist, he regularly works with many orchestras, including the Symphony Orchestras and the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He is also involved in many theatrical productions of the West End and have played with the Quartet 4-Mality in Taiwan and Australia, and with Between the Notes Ensemble in Europe, Asia and Australia.
As a soloist, he plays with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of Castile and Leon, and Gürzenich Orchester of Cologne.
In the field of chamber music, Sam Walton recorded the Sonata for two pianos and percussion by Bartók with Colin Currie, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, released by EMI Classics. Among his other recordings, he participated, with the other members of the Matthew barley Ensemble, in the CDs by Viktoria Mullova Through the Looking Glass (Philips, 2000) and The Peasant Girl (Onyx, 2011).

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