"...Martin Suckling's Violin Concerto, commissioned by London Music Masters (via an ingenious "buy a bar" fundraising campaign) for the fine Polish fiddler Agata Szymczewska, who tore into its fiendish challenges with huge energy and technical resource. The piece is titled De sol y grana - a reference to a Machado poem in which the poet compares his songs to bubbles glinting scarlet in the sunlight. Here the bubbles become musical segments, nine of them, some languorous or even lugubrious, others violently eruptive.
Rather than being the dominant force, the soloist is first among equals, fizzing in and out of weirdly imagined string and wind textures that are sometimes soured by quarter-tones. Disconcertingly, Suckling is fond of piling up disparate ideas or layers, then moving on. Yet, under trills or quivering oscillations from the soloist, the strands are finally gathered into a superb finish: a birdsong-like crescendo of ecstasy."
Richard Morrison, The Times, 13 December 2012
"Suckling's de sol y grana, a violin concerto commissioned by the music charity London Music Masters, was here receiving its first performance. It was inspired by Antonio Machado's poem, in which songs become bubbles, floating away on delicate, short-lived trajectories, refracting colours as they go. It's a delicate little conceit, but one that gives little hint of the sometimes forceful nature of the work.
Its opening section was tautly controlled and powerful, soloist Agneta Szymczewska dispatching volleys of notes with concentrated virtuosity against a feverish orchestral backdrop.
The technique and imagination on show throughout Suckling's score was enormously impressive, but the piece was most memorable in the later sections. An elegiac strings-only passage, played in heavy, long bows, made way for a brief, unexpectedly moving duet, Szymczewska's trills flitting playfully above a melancholy bass flute line. A tense build-up, with the violin increasingly insistent, led to the work's throwaway conclusion - a final bubble gently popping, one imagined."
Hugo Shirley, The Telegraph, 13 December 2012
"Hebridean psalm singing and chaos theory, Jorge Luis Borges and the harmonic overtone series. Unlikely bedfellows, but Martin Suckling fuses these influences and more into his engrossing, haunting and self-assured storm, rose, tiger. The Glasgow-born composer has been earmarked as an emerging talent; this latest work, written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, confirms the distinctness of his voice. It couples fierce intellect with the musical sensibility of a fine violinist, and offers a generous hand to listeners by keeping earthy hooks at the core of its clever tricks. The final resounding passacaglia strays toward filmic, but weird micro-tuning and fuzzy layering keep us on our toes."
[full article]Kate Molleson, The Guardian, 16 October 2011
"[...] the premiere of a significant new work by an emerging Scots composer [...] Martin Suckling's storm, rose, tiger [...] There's a palpable sense of exploration throughout this delicate score, whose intricate web of textures come and go like fleeting thoughts, yet are ingeniously threaded together with rich lyrical seams some of them very British in a Brittenesque way."
Kenneth Walton, The Scotsman, 15 October 2011
"An unusually elegant programme note certainly raised expectations for the world premiere of Martin Suckling's Storm, rose, tiger. The composer explained - if that's the right word - how the work emerged from an engagement with the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. A phrase in the short story 'The circular ruins' prompted Suckling's title, but rather than being a simple tale of taking a narrative and translating it into music, Suckling described a more mysterious alchemy of creative process.
Magic realism is a literary genre, and I don't know that anyone has attempted to create a musical equivalent, but if they were to do so then something along the lines of Storm, rose, tiger might very well be what it would sound like. The genre depends as much on the real as the magical. Given music's abstract nature, any ascription of 'reality' is bound to be arbitrary, but the diatonic tradition offers a reasonably convincing option. What Suckling does is use microtones in a quite different way from that of the likes of Boulez or Sariaaho: there is a clearly normative tonal feel, against which the microtonal is deployed to create the effects he seeks.
He does not share the high-modern hang-up about repetition (just as well, if you're going to be inspired by Borges). Backing that tonal feel, or furthering it, is a deployment of traditional rhetorical gestures. Indeed these might be said to create an illusion of tonality, because this is not tonic-dominant-style tonality, but rather a sense of internal logic.
Suckling's absorbing score called forth some intriguing associations: with Peter Maxwell Davies' Orkney Wedding and Sunrise, with the Sarabanda in George Crumb's Black Angels, and with Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic. (Come to think of it, I guess you could call Crumb a magic realist.) The searing drive in Suckling's concluding passacaglia, though, led from the deep registers, asserts a distinctive voice that we're likely to hear a good deal more of."
Peter Cudmore, Musical Criticism.com, 26 October 2011
"Martin Suckling is a young composer from Glasgow whose star is resolutely in the ascendant. This world premiere of his latest work, storm, rose, tiger, was a substantial piece that showed flashes of brilliance and some oddly confounding moments. Based on a Borges short story, The Circular Ruins, in which a magician brings life to, and destroys, a man he has conjured in his dreams, Suckling's work comes in deliberate bursts of inspiration. Its meandering aesthetic is defined by periods of purposefulness infuriatingly interrupted by sustained notes and the occasional string meltdown, as if Suckling is bringing into orchestral life the nightmare of the creative process.
Ticciati finds wistfulness and drive in this striking, innovative and affecting sound world. I foundered, however, at a late passage of microtonal orchestration so close that it made the orchestra sound hesitant and ear-splittingly out of tune. A slight sense too that there were more ideas than time. But there are always things one misses on the first hearing."
[full article (paywall)]
Sarah Urwin Jones, The Times, 17 October 2011
"For all the bewildering complexities of Martin Suckling's new work, entitled storm, rose, tiger, Ticciati and the SCO delivered the brilliantly-orchestrated piece with the lucidity required to make its individual sections clear: from its breathtaking start, opening one window allowing the light to stream in, and a second, permitting a creeping darkness to filter into the music, to passages of great animation and sections of relative calm and stillness. What I didn't get from a first hearing was any real sense of the big structure or the trajectory of the music; and I didn't understand the programme note. This is my problem; not Ticciati's and not the SCO's."
Michael Tumelty, The Herald, 17 October 2011
"These [micro]tones [in storm, rose, tiger] blur and smudge the music chillingly, giving an impression of the notes almost melting before our ears. It can be profoundly unsettling, but I found it very compelling and exciting to listen to. The piece never lost its dynamic rhythm and managed to remain organic while still working through great blocks of contrasts."
Simon Thompson, Seen and Heard International, 17 October 2011
"The world premiere of storm, rose, tiger by the young Glasgow-born composer Martin Suckling opened Thursday night's concert Usher Hall by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and if this astonishingly confident and likeable work is anything to go by, the SCO's bold decision to put five new commissions in its 2011-12 season was a wise one.
[...] [The music's] arresting sounds and strong sense of forward propulsion indeed gave it an appealing logic and sense of inevitability. Suckling's extensive use of microtones [...] meant that the piece had a strange poetry, as though it was not so much out of tune as dealing in a heightened reality. The SCO's performance was alive to the music's inpetuous energy yet also full of sensitivity, and in a precise, controlled reading conductor Robin Ticciati ensured that the piece's moments of expectant stillness were suitably suggestive."
David Kettle, The Edinburgh Reporter, 16 October 2011
"Martin Suckling's Candlebird, five adaptions of verse by Don Paterson, benefiting from the powerful, clear diction of the baritone Leigh Melrose, and finding unsuspected subtleties in both Scottish vernacular music and quarter-tonal tuning, was simply staggeringly assured."
Paul Driver, The Sunday Times, 5 June 2011
"But on the bright side there was the 30-year-old Martin Suckling's luxuriously imaginative song cycle Candlebird, a Sinfonietta commission. Poems by Don Paterson, sharp and tender, sparked a circus of scorched lyric phrases, dancing globules, odd folksy twirls, dips into speech and abundant panache. Echoes of Britten could be heard; but Suckling stayed his own man, especially in magnificent The Wind, a whirling jewel of multiple layers. Barring the speech, Leigh Melrose's enthusiastic baritone made every note and phrase expressive; and Nicholas Collon, the evening's occasional conductor, revelled in music well worth conducting."
Geoff Brown, The Times, 1 June 2011
"Three new Sinfonietta commissions were crammed into an eclectic programme of six works. The most striking came from the youngest composer, Martin Suckling, whose Candlebird is a song cycle to five poems by Don Paterson. Each song is immediately characterised with a new musical idea; the writing is tangibly evocative. The third song, Motive, centres around a storm conjured in buffeting knocks on the instruments; in the title song, sliding, indistinct string melodies sound like a Brahms sextet melting in extreme heat. Baritone Leigh Melrose rose superbly to the music's demands." [full article]
Erica Jeal, The Guardian, 1 June 2011
"Martin Suckling's Candlebird (2011) [...] was constantly compelling over its 25 minutes [...], gratefully set for the words and for the voice, and imaginatively scored. [...] The opening setting 'The Landscape' (Desnos) is enticingly lyrical, the singer required to speak as well [...] atmospheric, beautiful, rather Brittenesque, perched somewhere between Serenade (for tenor, horn and strings) and A Midsummer Night's Dream. 'Sky Song' (also Desnos) enjoys rapturous paragraphs, to be then contrasted with the angular and incident-packed 'Motive' (the Paterson original) and the exuberant, much-fragranced dance of 'The Wind' (Machado). Finally 'Candlebird' itself and its manifold beauties and rich divisi (Tippettian) strings, the singer reaching an intensity worthy of a muezzin before the frozen, strings now unanimous, conclusion. Maybe Suckling takes a little too long in each poem to set what are a few paragraphs, but such expansion is also captivating and exhilarating in a cycle that has the potential for longevity." [full article]
Colin Anderson, The Classical Source, 31 May 2011
"...the brilliant World Premiere of Martin Suckling's luscious Candlebird for Baritone and chamber orchestra. [...] Both text and setting of Candlebird are simply beautiful. [...] Suckling's piece was an island of excellence amongst numerous uncomfortable moments; even if the finesse of Collon and the London Sinfonietta shone consistently. [...] Concerts and musical structures may be less formal now, but to write off contemporary music with such flippancy is to deny the power that the shining lights such as messers Matthews and Suckling have to evoke the audience's emotional involvement in a disturbing, exciting, touching and peculiarly modern way." [full article]
Katy Austin, 30 May 2011
"an exhilarating, gleaming little masterpiece from Martin Suckling, The Moon, The Moon!, whose dazzling orchestration was a breathtaking wonder" [full article]
Michael Tumelty on The Moon, the Moon!, The Glasgow Herald, 16 May 2011
"string writing that created a supernatural sound-world of textured microtones" [full article]
Kate Molleson on What Shall I Give?, The Herald, 21 March 2011
"Martin Suckling's ethereal inventiveness" [full article]
Kenneth Walton on What Shall I Give?, The Scotsman, 20 March 2011
"seeking to realise (as he told us from the stage) a world of fantasy hidden inside the initial, explosive, bottom-register piano chord, it uses quarter tones with affecting naturalness and proved a gripping invention." [full article]
Paul Driver on To See the Dark Between, The Sunday Times, 16 May 2010
"In contrast to the near-Impressionist atmospherics of Duddell comes the clear high jinks of Martin Suckling's The Moon, The Moon (2007). The composer's stated intention was to write something that 'felt like an overture' and, in its bright colours and passages of held-breath expectancy, it succeeds. There is a light orchestrational touch that could almost be described as post-Mendelssohnian, and if Edward Lear's Owl and the Pussycat is the stated referand, the spirit of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is also invoked."
Colin Clarke, Tempo, April 2009
"Martin Suckling's Breathe provided a short, teasing opener, its gradually expanding gestures inspired by the composer's dozing cat and sensitively packaged by a tight-knit, reduced SSO ensemble." [ full article]
Kenneth Walton, The Scotsman, 23 June 2009
". . .the pieces are expertly written and have a bracingly distinctive sound-world. Three pieces stand out: Martin Suckling's The Moon, the Moon is a surreal dance full of unexpected corners, Helen Grime's Virga develops a remarkable turbulent weight within its small frame, and Jason Yarde's amusing Rude Awakening! has the best musical portrait of oversleeping you're ever likely to hear." [full article]
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph, 4 March 2009
"Martin Suckling's Aotromachd/Lightness, a setting of Meg Bateman's Gaelic poem commissioned for this tour, began in a fiercely driven dissonant flurry, but such complex outpourings alternated with simpler melodic passages and glistening high harmonics. Mezzo-soprano Jane Irwin sang the Gaelic lyric beautifully, followed by a section in which she spoke the English version, interspersed with the melody, gently hummed." [full article]
Kenny Mathieson, The Scotsman, 13 November 2008
"A work of breathtaking contrasts, it centred on a Gaelic poem by Meg Bateman. Tangles of frenetic string playing alternated with long, held notes, often as disembodied harmonics. Extremes of rhythmic complexity vied with simple melody while Jane Irwin's sung Gaelic changed to fragments of spoken English, punctuated by the melody hummed softly as from some remote and undefined distance. It was an intriguingly atmospheric work." [full article]
Alan Cooper, The Herald (Glasgow), 12 November 2008
"The most interesting writing was in the quartet-only sections, particularly the brutal, jagged opening and the spectral harmonics towards the end."
Rowena Smith, The Guardian, 7 November 2008
". . . the sawn shards of Martin Suckling’s Aotromachd (“lightness” in Gaelic) for string quartet and mezzo lurked self-consciously in the shadows.
Meg Bateman’s lost-love poem comes in two halves, a concept that Suckling hammers literally. Irwin’s glossy mezzo gives warmth to the opening stanza’s cold strings, before the darker recriminations of the conclusion, a haunting mezzo hum interspersed with harshly spoken word. Compelling, if not altogether pretty, it doesn’t always pull off its buzz of ideas." [full article]
Sarah Urwin Jones, The Times, 7 November 2008
"For The Island by Martin Suckling the orchestra was wrapped around the audience in the galleries. Single notes and figures were swapped across the auditorium, growing into new shapes, given new resonances from piano and percussion with wisps and tendrils of themes leading off into unexpected directions." [full article]
John Gough,The Birmingham Post, 28 October 2008
" The Moon, the moon! (Edward Lear) by Martin Suckling, like Grime’s Virga, is satisfying complex: sinewy, effervescent, texturally busy (not least in the strings), and evanescent in its changes from jubilant brass to engaging rhythmic patterns with craggy gestures, note-bending from flutes (somewhat Japanese) and an unceremoniously arrived at and cut from [climax]. Seemingly disjointed – it worked!" [full article]
Colin Anderson, The Classical Source, 10 May 2008
"The work was episodic but wholly coherent, building up through a variety of brilliantly conceived orchestral textures before dissolving into an unexpected French horn solo echoed by bowed triangle. [...] Throughout he created a sense of narrative drama [....] a young, confident, and richly communicative compositional voice." [full article]
Will May on The Moon, the moon!, new notes, 3 Jan 2008
"The twelfth of eighteen UBS commissions, Martin Suckling's The Moon, the moon! proved to be one of the best so far, sustaining well its eight minutes and suggesting it could have been longer to advantage. [...] It is an impressively sonic piece, very well orchestrated [...] Music to hear again." [full article]
Colin Anderson, The Classical Source, 19 December 2007
"The most impressive work of the evening, however, was by Martin Suckling. [...] His understated, rather lovely Breathe [...] had a relaxed symphonic control that spoke of great talent." [full article]
Tim Rutherford-Johnson, new notes, 27 April 2007
"Martin Suckling'sMosaic proved an artful piece of fragmentary modernism"
Conrad Wilson, The Herald, 5 March 2007
"Despite all the freedoms with tonality, on a first hearing the composition seemed more related to the late-romantic French style of a Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel or Jacques Ibert. [Red, red] earned very enthusiastic applause."
Jorg R�thlisberger, "Ein wahres Feuerwerk", Zuger Zeitung, 10 April 2006
"...so touching and unexpected that applause felt almost vulgar afterwards." [full article]
Timothy Andres on Sing in the Yale Daily News, 8 April 2005
"It's a happy, wired, jumpily pulsing score, approachable in idiom but unpredictable in movement." [full article]
Alex Ross on Play in The Rest is Noise, Jan 2005
"In seinem Play l�sst de Schotte seiner Spielfrude freinen Lauf. Aber auch klanglich war das fast altmeisterlich gekonnt." [full article]
Georg-Friedrich K�hn, Frankfurter Rundschau, Jan 2005
"Or you may observe the ghost of high modernist neo-complexity in the music of Martin Suckling, enlivened, or perhaps subverted, by ostinato patterns which would have been red-pencilled out of existence by composition teachers a generation ago.'
John Halle, New Haven Advocate, "A Post-Classical Manifesto," March 2004
