Martin Suckling
Martin Suckling
“probably the most important figure in Scotland’s music since James MacMillan”
Martin Suckling is a composer and violinist.
News
News
News
News
I’m very very happy to be the guest of the Conservatoire & Orchestre de Caen from March 19-24 as part of their festival Aspects.
It will feature the French premieres of a whole tranche of my music, from Meditation (after Donne) to Visiones (after Goya), along with many of my pieces that don’t have parentheses in the titles. Pleasingly symmetrically it includes both the world premiere of my newest piece, Chanson à Cordes, as well as a performance of my oldest published piece, Three Venus Haiku.
i’m delighted also to be working with students at the conservatoire on my music, including most of the Òran Fìdhle set. Though not, as it happens this one or this one…
A few weeks ago I recorded an interview with the composer, YouTuber and podcaster Samuel Andreyev. He’s titled it ‘How to Write Beautiful Music’, which may or may not be an accurate description of the content…
Black Fell, an interactive digital opera by Martin Suckling and Frances Leviston, performed by Jonathan Morton and Loré Lixenberg, will be available to play online from Friday 3 November 2023 at black-fell.com.
Delighted that my album The Tuning – covering string chamber music from the last decade as well as the titular song cycle – has been awarded the ISM Award for New Music Recording at the Scottish Awards for New Music 2023!
Following on from its nomination for a Gramophone Award, The Tuning has now been shortlisted in the Scottish Awards for New Music 2023 in the ISM Award for New Music Recording category.
Performances
Performances
Performances
Performances
Composition / Audio
Composition
Composition / Audio
Composition
Martin is published by Faber Music Ltd. Perusal scores are available online at the Faber Score Library
AUDIO
Black Fell
(link to dedicated website)
THESE BONES, THIS FLESH, THIS SKIN
(link to dedicated website)
Candlebird CD and score available for purchase.
Visiones CD available for purchase. This Departing Landscape CD available for purchase.
Contact Faber Music Ltd. for other works.
Press
Press
Press
Press
‘one of the finest new settings of contemporary poetry by a British composer that I have heard for quite some time’
‘strikingly original […] mesmerising […] the music edges more and more towards surreal wonderment’
‘★★★★★ beautifully played and recorded […] grips the attention […] varied and impressive’
‘an indication of what the future might hold, as artists engage with online as a creative medium rather than simply a substitute for live experience.’
‘Engrossing […] This NMC Portrait might have been a time coming but the wait was worthwhile’
‘immensely appealing […] evocative […] the album seems likely to stir wider interest in Suckling’s music.’
‘A highly original and inventive composer, Suckling writes music that transports the listener to landscapes of tactile, photographic vividness, sensuous and immersive. To this end, he employs techniques that range from emphatic tonality to noise textures, freely blended and juxtaposed with an unfailing sense of color and paradoxical logic and inevitability.'
‘The ardent richness of his idiom is well attested by his five-movement piano concerto, and the way glittering modernism dramatically collides with solemnly imposing traditional rhetoric.’
‘Lockdown may have forced the collaborators into a new way of working in these bones, this flesh, this skin but the end result is a new way of experiencing for us too. Fascinating.’
“wistful settings […] in a lyrical arioso recitative, but always accessible, postmodernist style.”
". . . moments of sheer beauty . . . Suckling's on to a winner with this work, for that there is no doubt."
". . . a treat . . . like a Tuvan throat singer in places . . . an awesome sound . . . there were moments when hairs on the back of the neck tingled with delight"
"...the concert’s true highlight, the understated but tremendously effective Nocturne by Scottish composer Martin Suckling, piquant with spicy microtones, heavily perfumed, and given a spellbinding, assured performance, under appropriately dimmed lights, by Morton and Lawrance. Beguiling stuff."
About
About
About
About
Martin Suckling was born in Glasgow in 1981. After spending his teenage years performing in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and in ceilidh bands around Scotland, Suckling studied music at Clare College Cambridge and King’s College London. He was a Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale University from 2003-5, undertook doctoral research at the Royal Academy of Music, and subsequently became a Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at Somerville College, Oxford. His teachers include George Benjamin, Robin Holloway, Paul Patterson, Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, and Simon Bainbridge. He has benefited from residencies at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldeburgh Festival, Aspen, and IRCAM, and has won numerous awards including the 2008 Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize and a Philip Leverhulme Prize. He is Professor of Composition at the University of York.
Suckling has been championed by many leading orchestras and ensembles including the London Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Ensemble, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and the London Contemporary Orchestra. His music has been performed at Oxford Lieder, Ultraschall Berlin, and at the 2007 ISCM World Music Days in Hong Kong. In 2011 Suckling’s critically acclaimed Candlebird for baritone and ensemble, to poems by Don Paterson, was premiered by Leigh Melrose and the London Sinfonietta.
From 2013-18 Suckling was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Associate Composer, a partnership which resulted in Six Speechless Songs (premiered by Robin Ticciati and later revived by Oliver Knussen), a concerto for pianist Tom Poster, and Meditation (after Donne) for chamber orchestra and electronics. Other orchestral works include Release, premiered at the 2013 Tectonics festival by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and The White Road, a flute concerto for Katherine Bryan and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (2017).
Suckling also enjoys a close relationship with the Aurora Orchestra. A recent tour of Candlebird, conducted by Nicholas Collon, followed two commissions: Psalm for harp and spatialised ensembles premiered at the Royal Academy of Arts as part of Edmund de Waal’s ‘white’ project in 2015, and the String Quintet Emily’s Electrical Absence, the result of a collaboration with Poet in the City and Frances Leviston premiered in 2018. Other chamber works include Nocturne, a 2013 duo for violin and cello for Pekka Kuusisto and Peter Gregson, and a clarinet trio Visiones (after Goya) which premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival by Mark Simpson, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Tamara Stefanovich in 2015. Suckling received a Scottish Award for New Music for his song cycle The Tuning, commissioned by Oxford Lieder and premiered in 2019 by mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons.
Suckling’s latest orchestral work This Departing Landscape, commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic and completed in 2019, gives its name to an orchestral portrait disc released by NMC in 2021. these bones, this flesh, this skin, Suckling’s interactive web-based collboration with Scottish Ensemble, Scottish Dance Theatre, and cinematographer Genevieve Reeves received both a Scottish Award for New Music and Classical:NEXT Innovation Award in 2021. A chamber portrait disc, The Tuning, was released by Delphian in January 2022.