North-Sound Winds and Max Lifchitz - Robert Martin: Four Wind Quintets (2019)

The four compositions featured on this album employ one of my favorite combination of instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet French horn and bassoon. The agility, flexibility, contrapuntal possibilities and abundance of timbres inherent in the instruments that comprise the wind quintet have always energized my musical imagination.

Much of Robert Martin's music concerns itself with the human reaction to the faint and fading glimpse of reality that all things will evanesce. Mike Strizic, music critic for the Canadian website MyEntertainmentWorld.ca, observed: “Other modern composers have been content to let dissonance do their work for them, with little thought to resolving that dissonance into a cohesive whole. Martin, by contrast, appears to firmly grasp the summative nature of his work – he refuses to shoehorn his material into formulae that do not enhance its essentially expressionist nature, and for that I applaud him.”