Philip Martin is an Irish composer in his forties, a pupil of Franz Reizenstein and Sir Lennox Berkeley. His music is lyrical and economical, tonal and melodious. He is also a fine pianist, and writes gratefully for voices and instruments.
His Piano Trio, the most considerable work here, was commissioned by the Crawford Trio for performance in the art gallery in Cork from which they take their name. It is Martin's 'Pictures at an Exhibition', illustrating seven of the paintings in that collection, linking them not with 'promenades', as in Mussorgsky, but with brief interludes in which we sense the composer saying ''Where next? Good heavens, is that a Jack Yeats in the next room?'' Sober lyricism, then, and close, expert counterpoint for a melancholy ''Goose Girl'' by Edith Somerville (author as well as painter: one half of Somerville and Ross), evocations of Irish folk music for Diarmuid O'Ceallachain's ''The Fiddler'' (though this fiddler knows his Bartok as well), a fine surge of waves for indeed a splendid Jack Yeats, ''Off the Donegal Coast''. It must have been a delightful evening in the Crawford Gallery, recapturable by the CD listener since all seven pictures are excellently reproduced in colour in the accompanying booklet, giving an extra dimension to this attractive work. And the Crawford Trio are quite outstandingly good; more recordings from them would be welcome.
Light Music is curious: a cycle of songs to poems by Derek Mahon so epigrammatically brief that 25 of them occupy only 24 minutes. They are not light in weight but rather are about light, and here Martin's lyricism is thinned down, sometimes to a striking bareness (a tiny evocation, only a few seconds long, of a glimmer of light in one of Rembrandt's paintings), once or twice to blandness, though part of the reason for that may have been Martin's very skill in tailoring these songs to his wife Penelope Price Jones's voice, which is small, as pure as a treble in the upper register, but less reliable lower down. There is bareness without blandness to the songs with violin (an effective series of also epigrammatic settings of American Indian verses) and to the Elegies for violin and piano. The Rainbow Comes and Goes is ampler, serenely lyrical (it is in part a portrait of the composer's children), ending with a brilliant and quite difficult scherzo: the piece was written for a piano competition.
On this evidence Martin is a lyrical miniaturist, but the Piano Trio's unobtrusive unification of a sequence of miniatures into something rather bigger suggests that he is capable of more. Marco Polo I see, promise a coupling of three of his orchestral pieces. The performances here are excellent throughout, and the recordings are first-class.
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