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Biography
Matthew's interests span the fine arts as well as the arts of performance. After a decade as a senior editor of Connoisseur magazine, he went independent in the early 1990s, building an extensive portfolio in prime outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and Smithsonian. In a long association with The New York Times, he covered classical music with an emphasis on opera and song, pop music, theater, Old Masters, living artists, dance, circus, and film. A generalist by conviction, he has also delved into architecture, archaeology, sports, travel, and the business of culture. Although he does not court controversy for controversy's sake, his opinion pieces have been known to strike a nerve. As a lecturer, interviewer, and moderator, Matthew has appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Goethe Haus in Los Angeles, and festivals in Italy and Switzerland, as well as in Honolulu. His sold-out talk series with master conductors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was taped for subsequent broadcast on WNYC radio. As an arts commentator, he has been heard on NPR's award-winning All Things Considered, WQXR in New York, and Hawaii Public Radio. In May 2019, he conducted live interviews with the director Peter Sellars and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Herrenhausen KunstFestSpiele in Hannover, Germany. Boldface names in culture and the arts had high praise for his privately published novel When Stars Blow Out: A Fable of Fame in Our Time. Between hard covers, he has written lead essays for collections of paintings by the Polish-American surrealist Rafal Olbinski, a history of the tenure of Riccardo Muti as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and two volumes documenting the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, with close-up portraits of such cultural icons as David Hockney, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julie Taymor. In 1999, he made his debut as a stage director with Wagner's romantic opera Lohengrin at the Maryinsky Theater, St. Petersburg, at the invitation of general director and principal conductor Valery Gergiev. Shortly after moving to Hawaii, Matthew wrote and produced for the Maui Fringe Theater Festival a microscopic double bill consisting of the one-act Celestial Mechanics, for three human beings and one solar system, preceded by the curtain raiser An Angel Unawares, for two voices, one of them silent. He is at work on longer-form dramatic projects based on the personal and family archives of immigrants to the United States in the years either side of World War II. Born in Schenectady, New York, Matthew grew up in Zurich, Switzerland. He holds a B.A. in English from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard, and an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management. |
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