|
This Midnight Hour |
Composed: 2015 Estimated length: |
|
Born on March 9, 1980, in London, England; currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. |
|
|
First performance: November 13, 2015, with Enrique Mazzola conducting the Orchestre national d'Île de France in Plaisir, France. |
|
|
First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work. |
|
Among the most frequently performed living British composers, Anna Clyne is an intensely collaborative artist. Poetry, dance, film, and painting—as well as technological innovations—often serve as an impetus for her creative work. Clyne also attracts interest from musicians outside the classical realm: Björk, for example, has programmed her music. The GRAMMY® Award-nominated composer, who has lived in the United States since 2002, has served residencies with several American orchestras; this season she is partnering with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, and the Symphony Orchestra of Castilla y León.
This Midnight Hour, which was co-commissioned by the Orchestre national d'Île de France and Seattle Symphony, is a marvelous example of Clyne’s interdisciplinary musical world. She was inspired by the nocturnal and musical imagery she found in two different poems. The first, “La musica,” is a brief, potently imagistic poem by the Nobel Prize-winning Spanish writer Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958). Here is the entire text, translated by Robert Bly: “Music;—a naked woman/running mad through the pure night.” Clyne’s imagination was also provoked by the famous poem “Harmonie du noir” (“Evening Harmony”) from Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) epochal Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil).
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
In addition to the nocturnal images of the Jiménez and Baudelaire poems, Clyne says she was inspired by the darker sound of the low strings that characterizes the Orchestre national d'Île de France—a sonority that This Midnight Hour conjures at the outset. Without intending to suggest a specific programmatic narrative, writes Clyne, the title is meant to evoke a “mysterious journey of a woman, compressed into a single hour.”
Jiménez’s symbol of music as a “mad woman” is depicted by agitated rhythms and “outbursts of frenetic energy” from the strings, divided into multiple subsections so the music can cascade downward “from left to right in stereo effect.” Baudelaire’s reference to a “melancholy waltz and languid vertigo” prompts a “slightly warped version of a waltz” developed from folklike melodic material. About halfway through, Clyne has the orchestra mimic the sound of an accordion in a Parisian cafe by splitting the violas into two separately tuned sections.
Overall, according to Clyne, This Midnight Hour’s soundscape ranges in mood from “playful to more ominous,” juxtaposing chamber music-like solo passages with a deft use of the full ensemble. The experience is akin to watching a highly compressed film, or like seeing a lifetime flashing before a dying person's eyes—with a surprise ending.
Scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 2 percussionists, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Back