Matt Dunkley

Matt is the UK's, and indeed one of the world’s, leading orchestrators, arrangers and conductors, who has also managed to develop a successful parallel career as a talented film, TV and theatre composer. Matt has scored feature films including: The Four Musketeers, directed by Pierre Aknine and starring Emmanuelle Béart and the action thriller Storm Force (Windkracht 10), directed by Hans Herbots. He has also scored a number of network series for British Television including Spirit Warriors, I Saw You, Rescue Me, Safe as Houses and Number 13, as well as music for major adverts and production libraries. In 2018/19 Matt was asked to become musical director for the Judy Garland film biopic Judy, working very closely with the film’s star Renée Zellweger, and arranging and conducting all the musical numbers in the movie. Renée’s performance went on to win her a Golden Globe, Bafta and Oscar. For the theatre, he wrote and arranged all the music for the ground-breaking arena version of Peter Pan: The Neverending Story, that opened in Brussels December 2012, before embarking on theatre and arena tours of Europe and the Middle East, and he has also written Flanders Fields and Cinderella for theatrical productions in Belgium, Singapore and the Middle East. Upcoming productions include composing a musical based on the hugely popular Chinese video game Honor of Kings, to tour China next year. In the summer of 2018 Matt conducted the premiere of The Hamlet Complex for the Norwegian National Ballet in Oslo, directed by the acclaimed choreographer Alan Lucien Oyen. In 2016 he released his critically acclaimed debut solo album, Six Cycles, on the Village Green label, which reached the Top 20 in the UK Classical Charts and featured as part of a contemporary dance work, Meta, by Charlotte Edmonds for the Royal Ballet Covent Garden in London, and as part of the score for the French movie La Fete Des Meres. Matt’s second solo album, Cycles 7-16, was released in January 2018, music from which has been used in the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 11/9. His 3rd solo album “Pictures at an Exhibition” will be released autumn 2020 on the Pias label. Matt studied trumpet and piano at the London College of Music and then went on to work with world-renowned film orchestrator Christopher Palmer. This led to him working with the award-winning Scottish film composer, Craig Armstrong, for over 20 years. Since 2009 Matt has orchestrated and conducted exclusively for Golden Globe and Ivor Novello nominated composer Clint Mansell, and for the last 19 years Matt has also orchestrated and conducted for the superstar Indian composer, and Bafta, Golden Globe, double Grammy and two-time Oscar-winning, A.R. Rahman. Furthermore he regularly works with many of the most exciting names in film composition today – including Nicholas Brittel, Hans Zimmer, Marco Beltrami and Ramin Djawadi.