Anna Clyne: This Midnight Hour
Composer Anna Clyne (b. 1980)
The Philharmonic begins this season of adventure and discovery with a new work, Anna Clyne’s propulsive and appealing “This Midnight Hour.” Born and raised in London, Clyne studied in Edinburgh and at the Manhattan School of Music, and had been named composer-in-residence by the Chicago Symphony by the time she turned 30. “This Midnight Hour” dates to 2015, the year Clyne completed her five-year tenure in Chicago and began the same role with the Orchestre National de L’île de France.
“This Midnight Hour” takes its inspiration from two poems, one by Juan Ramòn Jimenez and one by Charles Baudelaire. Jimenez’s deft and tiny dab of a poem is so short that it can be quoted in its entirety: “Music:/ a naked woman/ running madly through the pure night,” and the work’s propulsive opening, driven by basses, cellos, bassoons, and even tuba perfectly evoke a sense of running through the darkness. Baudelaire’s poem, the well-known Harmonie de Soir, has inspired music by Liszt, Debussy, and many others; it takes the form of a pantoum, where the same lines recur at different places in succeeding stanzas, giving a dreamlike effect more incantatory than narrative.
With repeating lines like “The violin quivers like a tormented heart…” and “Melancholy waltz and languid dizziness!” Baudelaire’s poem is obviously the inspiration for the second part of the 12-minute work. Episodic and even free-associative in feel, the piece alternates between moments of effusive drama, melodies one might have encountered in an old Parisian café (at one moment the orchestra is even instructed to play without vibrato and deliberately out of tune, to evoke the sound of an accordion!), and passages of spooky abstraction. Orchestras love to play “This Midnight Hour,” because everyone, from piccolo all the way down to tuba, gets something good to play, and audiences are delighted to encounter a new piece by a young composer with the kind of direct emotional appeal they associate with the Romantic mainstream of the repertoire.
See a performance
Hear This Midnight Hour
Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.