Matthew Whittall

Matthew Whittall (1975) began his studies in Montreal as a hornist, earning degrees in performance and composition from the University of Massachusetts and Stony Brook University, before settling in Finland in 2001. There he studied at the Sibelius Academy, receiving his Doctor of Music degree with distinction in 2013. His principal teachers include Robert Jones, Salvatore Macchia, Perry Goldstein, Eero Hämeenniemi and Veli-Matti Puumala. His works have been performed at Helsinki’s Music Centre Hall, Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, Opera City in Tokyo, and on international festivals such as Nordic Music Days, Helsinki Musica nova, Tampere Vocal Music Festival, Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival and Ottawa Chamberfest. Whittall’s eclectic output has focused in recent years on symphonic music, with several major works commissioned by Finland’s leading orchestras. Whittall has, in the past few years, created an aesthetic mode of expression that is not only extremely personal but also truly unique, and this may be just the prelude. Among his most recent works is the piano concerto Nameless Seas, premiered by Angela Hewitt. Whittall’s chamber music covers a broad spectrum of styles and ensembles, but he has also been deeply involved in Finland's choral scene as both a composer and a performer since his earliest days in the country. Whittall’s music is marked by an attempt to fuse its various disparate influences – Old and New World, Western and non-Western, sacred and secular, classical, folk and popular – into a single, variegated expressive language, and by a use of extramusical imagery ranging from natural phenomena to poetry and landscape art.