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 what the song is trying to say and gives it the fullest possible voice. That gift has made him indispensable to an extraordinary range of artists: from Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Panic! At the Disco 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 through that same trust, built over years, 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.
Among the records that have quietly earned Mathes a second wave of recognition is Pretty. Odd. — his production of Panic at the Disco's sophomore album, once misread as a commercial disappointment and now widely regarded by insiders as the band's defining work. It is the kind of record that rewards patience, which perhaps explains why Mathes remains so proud of it.
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 tribute honoring Springsteen, a concert featuring Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Tom Morello, and Ben Harper, now preserved on DVD and Blu-Ray.
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, earning Tony and Drama Desk nominations for his work. He is currently working with Elvis Costello on a new musical in development based on the Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd.
His film and concert work is as impressive as his 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 arrangements 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.
Some of the most defining moments of his career have come on the world's grandest stages. He served as music director and arranger for Beyoncé's performance of America the Beautiful at the Obama Presidential Inauguration — one of the most-watched musical moments in modern American history. He arranged and conducted Renée Fleming's performance of the National Anthem at Super Bowl XLVIII, heard by over 115 million viewers. And he served as music director for Bono's Red 10th Anniversary Concert at Carnegie Hall, a landmark celebration of the RED campaign bringing together some of the most important voices in music for a cause.
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.
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 — Orchestral Songs, recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London and most notably Evening Train, now remastered and available for the first time in 180G vinyl.
His collaboration with Sting yielded one of the more extraordinary commissions of his career: Dies Irae, a piece he co-wrote and co-produced with Sting that is now performed on a continuous loop in the Sistine Chapel — the last music visitors hear before entering one of the most sacred spaces in the world. He received two Emmy nominations for Original Scores for HBO films — the documentary Herblock and Thurgood, starring Laurence Fishburne as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Today, Rob Mathes is a member of the faculty at BerkleeNYC and the creator and host of Straight Up at The Power Station — a YouTube series filmed at the legendary Power Station studios in New York City, documenting live performances of songs from his catalog performed with world-class friends including Shawn Pelton, and Will Lee. It 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.