Belfast-born Neil Martin is a composer and musician with an international reputation and a most varied and rewarding career encompassing dance, opera, theatre, film, television, radio, concert hall and studio. Recent works include an opera, Nobody/Somebody (2023), a violin concerto, dall’ombra (2022), the Royal Television Society Award-winning score for a ninety-minute television film, Lost Lives (2020), theatre scores and chamber music. Among other works are Sweeney (2018), an orchestral song cycle based on Seamus Heaney’s ‘Sweeney Astray’ written for traditional singer (Iarla Ó Lionáird) and narrator (Stephen Rea), and an octet, The Helping Hand (2017). Other significant works include This Is an Irish Dance (2015), a duet for dancer and cellist co-created and performed with Jean Butler; a score for Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (2017); with librettist Glenn Patterson an opera, Long Story Short: The Belfast Opera (2016); and the choral symphony OSSA (2007). His first major orchestral work was No Tongue Can Tell (2004), an uilleann pipes concerto written for Liam O’Flynn.

A cellist and an uilleann piper, Neil has collaborated with many leading artists, including Liam O’Flynn, Bryn Terfel, Sam Shepard, Christy Moore, Stephen Rea, Josh Groban, Jean Butler and Barry Douglas – and with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Ireland’s principle orchestras. He has scored music for plays on Broadway, in the West End and in Europe, and has contributed to more than a hundred albums. Performance venues range from Carnegie Hall to the Palazzo Vecchio, and his groundbreaking work with the West Ocean String Quartet has been lauded globally and even beyond – the quartet’s recordings have been played aboard the International Space Station. The quartet’s most recent album, Atlantic Edge, was released in 2020.