Martyn Harry: Piano Works and Songs

Regular price $20.99
Label
Toccata
Release Date
May 15, 2026
Format
Added to Cart! View cart or continue shopping.


    Featuring
    • COMPOSER
      Martyn Harry
    • PERFORMER
      Lore Lixenberg, Jonathan Powell, Anna Akhmatova
    Product Details
    • RELEASE DATE
      May 15, 2026
    • UPC
      5060113447975
    • CATALOG NUMBER
      TOCC0797
    • LABEL
      Toccata
    • NUMBER OF DISCS
      1
    • GENRE

Baseball, Bach, a disused railway line and the misuse of music in Iraqi prisons 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.