“The music of Scottish composer Martin Suckling (b. 1981) feels at home in many styles and none, embracing ‘open’ microtones, airy consonance and knottily naturalistic dissonance. The Tuning sets five poems by Michael Donaghy, named after the fourth of them, intensely evocative of its themes of night and water, love and loss and sleep, in the tradition of great songwriters from Schubert to Britten. A solo-cello Lullaby circles round and down to an elegiac core. There is something ancient and mysterious about a violin-cello Nocturne like a spell cast from folk wisdom, and the individuality of his string writing (blurred memories of LLigeti and Downland) and engagement with poetry combine in a haunting string quintet.”