Harry: Piano Works and Songs

Baseball, Bach, a disused railway line, and the use of music to torture prisoners might be unusual inspirations for the work of a composer whose primary profession is a professorship in Oxford. Yet the piano music of Martyn Harry—born in 1964 in Crawley, West Sussex—proves to be a wild, kaleidoscopic blend of just such unlikely influences: Erik Satie, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, American minimalism, Sergei Prokofiev, Valentin Silvestrov, and others, all with the goal of training the technique of his good friend, the magnificent pianist Jonathan Powell, whose untimely death in December 2025 shocked the music world. Much of this music has a cheerful, almost manic quality that found its counterpart in the tireless energy of Powell's playing. A song cycle setting six early poems by Anna Akhmatova takes up the tension she found in intimacy and unleashes a surprising degree of passion. On this recording, Jonathan Powell can still be heard, as well as the mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg.