"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's Mosaic 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."
Jürg Röthlisberger, "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 lässt de Schotte seiner Spielfrude freinen Lauf. Aber auch klanglich war das fast altmeisterlich gekonnt." [full article]
Georg-Friedrich Kühn, 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
