"Clarinettist Matthew Reid comes from Durban, where his first lessons were with Werner Dannewitz. He attained his Honours degree from UCT with Leslie Craven and completed a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Music in London. He has a diploma in Orchestral Studies (Dip NCOS) from Goldsmiths College in Greenwich. He won the SASOL and Oude Meester Prizes for instrumentalists in 1986 and  studied with Alfred Prinz in Vienna, Guy Deplus in Paris and John McCaw in London. He recorded Peter Klatzow's Clarinet Concerto with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra in 1992, and recently his Sonata with Pieter van Zyl.

Matthew performed extensively with the Sontonga String Quartet in 2006 and 2007 at the Arts Festivals in Grahamstown, Cape Town, Franschhoek, and the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival, giving the first performances of Oswaldo Golijov's extraordinary "Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind" in this country. Matthew runs both the "Playing with Fire Balkan Band" which has featured in Cape Town's popular Balkanology Parties, and the "Playing with Fire Klezmer Band". This year he was the music director of the annual Yiddish Song Festival in the Baxter Theatre for the ninth consecutive year.

With pianist Pieter van Zyl, Matthew has given recitals at the Grahamstown Arts Festival, the Paarl Cultivaria Festival, the Darling Voorkamerfees and  Harare's tenth International Festival of the Arts (HIFA). In 2008 they won the Kanna Award in the category of Classical Music at the Oudtshoorn KKNK and gave over thirty public recitals in 2009.

Matthew recently performed the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the Camerata Tinta Barocca at St Andrew's Church in Cape Town, the Kirstenbosch Music Breakfast Concert Series, at the opening concert of the new "Klein Karoo Klassique" Festival in Oudtshoorn and at the opening of the La MotteClassic Music festival in Franschhoek."

Please read below the article about me that appeared in THE FRANSCHOEK VALLEY MONTH: