⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ‘…destined to become a classic.’
‘intensely evocative…in the tradition of great songwriters from Schubert to Britten’
‘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’
‘Suckling’s chamber music, unsettling and stirring, deftly captures night’s hauntings.’
‘★★★★★ expansive and intimate … a vast colourful world’
‘★★★★★ blisteringly original […] exquisite […] sublime’
“In a dark time, this music will make you smile”
‘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’
★★★★★ – Concerto Choice, May 2021
‘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.’
‘music that left me wanting to step inside my radio for full immersion’
“wistful settings […] in a lyrical arioso recitative, but always accessible, postmodernist style.”
“impressively immediate, thoroughly captivating […] an enthralling score”