Martyn Harry: Piano Works and Songs
Baseball, Bach, a disused railway line and the use of music to torture prisoners might be unexpected inspirations behind the work of a composer who is an Oxford professor by day. But the piano music of Martyn Harry – born in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1964 – proves to be a wild, kaleidoscopic mix of just such unlikely influences: Satie, Sorabji, American minimalism, Prokofiev, Silvestrov and more, all intended to exercise the technique of his good friend, the fireball pianist Jonathan Powell, whose early death in December 2025 shocked the musical world. There is a gleeful, almost manic quality to much of this music that found a counterpart in the unflagging energy of Powell’s playing. A song-cycle setting six early Anna Akhmatova poems likewise taps into the tension she found in intimacy, releasing a surprising degree of passion.
Lore Lixenberg, mezzo-soprano
Jonathan Powell
Listen To This Recording:
Beltway Series (2014) (19:38)
- I. Arpeggios – (1:45)
- II. Con fuoco – (1:38)
- III. Embedded Chorale – (1:31)
- IV. Chromatic – (1:42)
- V. Toccata – (1:11)
- VI. Three-Part Invention – (2:10)
- VII. Giocoso (seventh inning stretch) (2:18)
- VIII. Textural Fugato (3:40)
- IX. Lament (empty ninth inning) (3:43)
Chamber Intimacy (2005) (19:18)
- I. – (4:23)
- II. (2:19)
- III. (2:05)
- IV. 2:58)
- V. (2:51)
- VI. (4:42)
Bletchley Bedford Sandy (2014-16) (24:08)
- I. Station I – (1:43)
- II. Station II – (1:02)
- III. Toccata I – (0:38)
- IV. Station III – (1:08)
- V. Toccata II – (0:29)
- VI. Station IV – (0:42)
- VII. Psalm I – (1:13)
- VIII. Station V – (1:04)
- IX. Toccata III – (0:33)
- X. Hymn I – (0:37)
- XI. Toccata IV (Crib) – (0:55)
- XII. Hymn II – (0:21)
- XIII. Memory Dump – (1:34)
- XIV. Hymn III – (0:21)
- XV. Psalm II – (0:30)
- XVI. Toccata V – (0:16)
- XVII. Hymn IV – (0:39)
- XVIII Toccata VI (Crib) – (1:49)
- XIX. Toccata VII – (0:49)
- XX. Psalm III – (0:47)
- XXI. Stretto – (2:49)
- XXII. Station VII – (1:22)
- XXIII. Memory Dump II (2:47)
- Restraint for Handcuffed Pianist (2004-5) (15:09)
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