Rob Mathes is an Emmy-winning, Grammy, Tony, and Drama Desk Award nominated arranger/composer and music producer/director. He has produced recordings by Sting, Rod Stewart, Carly Simon, Beth Hart, Vanessa Williams, Bettye LaVette, Melissa Errico, and the band Panic at The Disco. He is an Emmy winner for his music direction of the Kennedy Center Honors for CBS, and he arranged and musically directed Sting’s world tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Rob helmed HBO’s We Are One-Obama Inauguration Concert at the Lincoln Memorial featuring Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, John Legend, U2, Beyonce, and others and has musically directed the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame Awards for over two decades. He has written and conducted the orchestral arrangements for three recent Bruce Springsteen records, including the critically acclaimed recording and film Western Stars, and served as music director of Springsteen’s MusicCares Grammy Person of The Year tribute in 2013 featuring Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Tom Morello, and Ben Harper, among others, recently released on DVD and Blu-Ray. Rob has musically directed many evenings for the David Lynch Foundation, including a concert in LA featuring Moby, The Flaming Lips, Lykke Li, and Angelo Badalamenti released on the album Music of David Lynch, and a concert at Carnegie Hall featuring Katy Perry, Angelique Kidjo, Jim James, and Sting.
This year, Rob Mathes has had a busy year working on some big projects, one of the most recent being his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic orchestra for the opening of the new David Geffen Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York City. Joining Rob on stage for the opening gala night’s performance called The Journey, were Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton, Sara Bareilles, Brandon Victor Dixon, Renée Fleming, Brian Stokes Mitchel, Joaquina Kalukango, Bernadette Peters, Vanessa Williams and the Juilliard School Preparatory Division Chorus. In 2022, Rob also worked with Bruce Springsteen on the full string arrangements on his newest album Only the Strong Survive, which featured a collection of fifteen soul music greats; he also worked with Sting and Shaggy on their new album titled Com Fly Wid Mi, which is a compilation of the Frank Sinatra songbook sung in reggae style. The album was just nominated Best Reggae Album for the 2023 Grammy Awards. Rob Mathes' credits are many and include conducting the orchestrations for new artist Scarypoolparty's debut album The Act of Forgiveness on Hollywood Records, arranging and conducting the orchestra for Weezer's new album OK Human, conducting a live performance of Weezer's record with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA.
Rob has also written orchestrations for a number of artists all over the stylistic spectrum, from Elton John, Tony Bennett, Lou Reed, and Mavis Staples to Jay Z, Lenny Kravitz, Mary J. Blige, and Beck, from Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Harry Connick Jr., and Fall Out Boy, to work with classical artists such as Renée Fleming, Bryn Terfel, Deborah Voigt, and Yo-Yo Ma. His arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner for the 2013 Super Bowl for Renée Fleming and the New Jersey Symphony was published by Hal Leonard and his arrangement of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven for the band Heart (Ann and Nancy Wilson), performed at the Kennedy Center Honors, led to him being asked by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page to testify at the trial over the song’s publishing rights, which they won.
He arranged music for The Three Tenors-Live in Paris concert and was the arranger and guitarist for almost a decade of Pavarotti and Friends charity concerts held annually in Modena, Italy, Luciano Pavarotti’s hometown. Many of these collaborations came from Rob’s longtime relationship with the legendary producer Phil Ramone (Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra, among many others). Rob arranged a duet of the Van Morrison classic “Crazy Love” for Van and Ray Charles on Charles’s Grammy-winning Album of The Year Genius Loves Company and was the arranger and pianist on the late George Michael’s Songs from The Last Century album, both produced by Ramone.
As a composer, Rob was nominated for a Best Original Score Emmy twice; for the HBO movie Thurgood, starring Lawrence Fishburne, and the HBO documentary Herblock. Grammy-winning conductor Leonard Slatkin commissioned Rob to write a score for The Los Angeles Philharmonic based on Gershwin themes. His piece “Gershwiniana” was performed by Slatkin many times since its premiere. Rob’s “A Standing Ground: Concertino for Orchestra” was premiered by The Nashville Symphony and Slatkin in 2009. In 2010, Mahler expert Gilbert Kaplan, who owns the original manuscript of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, commissioned Rob to make a reduction with Kaplan of the symphony for smaller forces, now published by Universal Music.
Rob’s songs have been recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville, Vanessa Williams, Faith Hill, Wynonna Judd, and The Rascall Flatts, among others, and he co-wrote several songs with Sting for his album The Last Ship. In addition, he musically supervised and orchestrated Sting’s Broadway show of the same name (The Last Ship,) for which he was nominated for both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. In addition, he has been working with Elvis Costello on a musical in development based on the Elia Kazan movie “Face In The Crowd.”
Rob orchestrated and conducted the song scores for the films In The Heights, The Greatest Showman starring Hugh Jackman, and Tick, Tick… Boom!, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He wrote all the arrangements for Panic at The Disco’s #1 record, Pray For The Wicked and 2022’s Viva Las Vengeance. He recently orchestrated the band Weezer’s record OK Human and conducted the band’s streamed concert with the LA Philharmonic at Disney Concert Hall. He has released several records under his own name, most notably Evening Train and Orchestral Songs, recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.