Anna Clyne: Mythologies

Anna Clyne’s enormous palette of colors and special effects coalesce into an aural three-dimensional experience of striking originality. Equally theres a comforting familiarity to her music, as she draws inspiration from historic styles that she transforms into a new musical dialect. Annas background in electro-acoustic music and her fascination for a variety of multi-media including poetry, visual art and videography combine to create rich and exhilarating textures of popular appeal. The five works on Anna Clyne: Mythologies were written over a 10-year period between 2005 and 2015. The performances on the album feature the BBC Symphony Orchestra and four internationally-acclaimed conductors. Masquerade, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to open the Last Night of the Proms 2013 and conducted by Marin Alsop, captures the spirit of that quintessentially English tradition. The title evokes an 18th-century outdoor festivity featuring fireworks, acrobats and street entertainers. This Midnight Hour, conducted by the BBC Symphony Orchestras Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo, encapsulates the modernity and decadence of two European poets, Nobel Prize-winning Spaniard Juan Ramón Jiménez and Frenchman Charles Baudelaire. Oramo also conducts The Seamstress, a single-movement violin concerto in all but name, featuring soloist Jennifer Koh as well as the whispered voice of Irene Buckley reciting the works inspiration, a poem by William Butler Yeats. More poetry by a Nobel laureate, the Irishman Seamus Heaney, inspired Night Ferry; conducted by Andrew Litton, the work conjures crashing waves and weathered seafaring. The album concludes with rewind, conducted by André de Ridder. Its a wild romp imagining the backwards scroll of a video tape complete with glitches, skips and freezes.
“Anna Clyne’s Mythologies kicks off with the symphonic sweep of Masquerade, a sprawling orchestral fantasia commissioned in 2013 by the BBC to open the “Last Night” of the Proms. It’s marked by a cinematic swirl of strings that propels the listener into the five individual works on this disc, which play like movements of a scintillating symphony.Clyne, 40, honed her craft on electro-acoustic music. She is a Grammy-nominated British composer and cellist with an uncanny knack for penning melodies that sound both old and new. On these works, recorded for BBC Radio between 2011 and 2018, she teams with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Marin Alsop, and Jennifer Koh on solo violin. Clyne’s dynamic sound can range from pastoral to turbulent, marked by sudden mood swings, but never jarring. The forward drive of Masquerade,evoking an exuberant spirit and stirring the imagination, is continued on The Midnight Hour, a 2015 commission by the Seattle Symphony and Orchestre national d’Île-de-France. Those mood swings also inform the dramatic Night Ferry, a 2012 Chicago Symphony Orchestra commission designed to complement Franz Schubert’s own stormy emotions.The Seamstress is a work written for violin. Inspired by personal loss, it opens with a dark, fiddlelike folk melody played in the low registers before resolving into high acrobatics. Clyne retains her command of melody throughout. The closer, <