Composer · Arranger · Producer · Music Director
FULL BIOGRAPHY
There is a particular kind of musician the greatest artists in the world turn to when the stakes are highest — when a Super Bowl performance has to be perfect, when a Broadway score has to work on the first night, when a film needs an orchestra to make an audience feel something they cannot name. Rob Mathes is that musician. Bruce Springsteen has called him his "secret weapon." Sting calls him his "lion" in the studio. And for more than three decades, from Abbey Road to Carnegie Hall to the stages of Modena, Italy, Mathes has been the quiet force behind some of the most celebrated musical moments of our time.
An Emmy and Grammy winner, Tony, and Drama Desk Award nominee, Mathes operates at the rarest intersection of classical training, pop instinct, and human depth. He is the kind of arranger who does not simply ‘arrange’ a song — he finds the essence of the song and gives it the fullest possible voice. That gift has made him indispensable to an extraordinary range of artists: from Sting, Bruce Springsteen, and Rod Stewart to Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and Bryn Terfel; from Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Lenny Kravitz to Elton John, Aretha Franklin, and Tony Bennett.
His relationship with the legendary producer Phil Ramone opened doors that few musicians ever see. It was through Ramone that Mathes arranged a duet of Van Morrison's "Crazy Love" for Van Morrison and Ray Charles — a track that appeared on Charles's Grammy-winning Album of the Year, Genius Loves Company. It was through Ramone that he became arranger and pianist on George Michael's Songs from the Last Century. And it was that same trust that Mathes became the guitarist and arranger for nearly a decade of Pavarotti and Friends concerts — the annual charity events held in Luciano Pavarotti's hometown of Modena, Italy, that brought together the world's greatest voices for a cause.
His production work reaches into unexpected corners of popular music as well. Mathes produced Panic! at the Disco's Pretty. Odd., the band's ambitious follow-up to the multi-platinum debut. Though it was initially dismissed as a sophomore stumble, the album has since been reassessed by fans and critics alike as the group's most fully realized work.
His work with Springsteen alone would constitute a remarkable career. Mathes wrote and conducted the orchestral arrangements for three Springsteen records, most notably the critically acclaimed Western Stars — the recording and film that many consider one of Springsteen's most emotionally complete works. He also served as music director of the MusicCares Grammy Person of the Year tributes honoring Springsteen, Elton John, Bono and Jon Bon Jovi.
With Sting, the collaboration has been equally deep and enduring. Mathes has produced three albums for Sting, arranged and musically directed his world tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and co-wrote several songs for The Last Ship — before going on to musically supervise and orchestrate the Broadway production of the same name. In one of their more unusual collaborations, Mathes and Sting wrote and co-produced "Dies Irae," a piece now played in the waiting room outside the Sistine Chapel.
Underscoring the "Music Director" credit in his own title, Mathes has spent decades as the person top artists and institutions turn to when a live performance needs someone to engage the room of talent. For the past 25 years, he has been the MD responsible for arranging, orchestrating, and conducting the annual Songwriters Hall of Fame Concert, one of the music industry's most prestigious annual honors.
His film work is as impressive as his concert and recording credits. Mathes orchestrated and conducted the song scores for The Greatest Showman starring Hugh Jackman, In the Heights, and Tick, Tick... Boom! directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He arranged and conducted the opening of the newly renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic. Most recently, Rob contributed string arrangement for four songs, including “Golden”, the inescapable hit from the movie KPop Demon Hunters, becoming the first-ever K-pop song to win a Grammy Award. And in one of the more extraordinary footnotes of a career full of them, his orchestral arrangement of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" — performed by Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson at the Kennedy Center Honors — led Robert Plant and Jimmy Page to personally ask Mathes to testify as an expert witness at the trial over the song's publishing rights. They won.
Mathes has also distinguished himself as a composer. Grammy-winning conductor Leonard Slatkin commissioned him to write Gershwiniana for the Los Angeles Philharmonic — a score built on Gershwin themes that Slatkin has performed many times since its premiere. His concertino A Standing Ground was premiered by the Nashville Symphony. Mahler scholar and manuscript owner Gilbert Kaplan commissioned him to create a reduced orchestration of Mahler's Second Symphony, now published by Universal Music. He has also received two Emmy nominations for Original Score, for the HBO documentary Herblock and for Thurgood, starring Laurence Fishburne as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
As a songwriter, his songs have been recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville, Faith Hill, Vanessa Williams, David Sanborn, Alabama, and Wynonna Judd, among others. And as a recording artist in his own right, Mathes has released several albums under his own name — most notably Evening Train, now remastered and available for the first time on 120-gram vinyl, and Orchestral Songs, recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.
A kind and generous gesture on Rob's part is his hosting of over 30 years of The Rob Mathes Holiday Concert — a tradition for those in the know. Rooted in his hometown of Greenwich, CT, takes place every December at The Performing Arts Center at Purchase College in Purchase, New York, with guests including Sting, Vanessa Williams, David Sanborn, and Michael McDonald alongside his regular all-star band and choir.
Today, Rob Mathes brings all of that experience into a new chapter. He is a member of the faculty at BerkleeNYC, and the creator and host of Straight Up at The Power Station— a YouTube video series filmed at the legendary Power Station studios in New York City, to document live performances of songs in Rob’s catalog with world-class musicians who are his dear friends. The series is, in many ways, the most honest expression yet of who Rob Mathes is: a musician's musician, a storyteller, and someone who has spent a lifetime listening closely enough to know exactly what to say.