Martyn Harry: Piano Works And Songs – Lore Lixenberg

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.