Marin Alsop Conducts Anna Clyne for Naxos

Anna Clyne and Marin Alsop on the cover of the album being discussed

This coming Friday, Naxos will release an album entitled Abstractions, which presents four compositions by Anna Clyne performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. As most readers will expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page to process pre-orders of this new release, currently available as an MP3 download. The first of the four works on the album, “Within Her Arms,” was composed for string ensemble. The other three, the Abstractions suite, “Restless Oceans,” and “Color Field,” are performed by full orchestra.

I am pretty sure that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra provided me with my first encounter with Clyne’s music. When they visited Davies Symphony Hall in February of 2012, Music Director Riccardo Muti presented a “three centuries of modernism” program, which included the West Coast premiere of her “Night Ferry,” inspired by Seamus Heaney’s memorial poem for Robert Lowell, “Elegy.” My reaction at that time was that Clyne had “too much to say” in that composition.

On Abstractions Clyne shows a better sense of saying her piece without dwelling on it. This is best represented by “Restless Oceans,” which is slightly less than four minutes in duration. As was the case with “Night Ferry,” this is music with visual connotations. Those connotations can also be found in both Abstractions and “Color Field.”

“Within Her Arms,” the opening track, is the only departure from the visual. Instead, it is memorial. Clyne began work on it after the death of her mother in 2008. It was composed on a commission by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which first performed it on April 7, 2009. It is a single-movement composition, scored for a string orchestra consisting of fifteen players.

I must confess that my past encounters with Clyne’s music (all of which took place in Davies) have been, to put it politely, variable. I can say the same about listening to the tracks on Abstractions. By now I have cultivated some familiarity with her rhetorical stances. I find it easy to adjust to each encounter with one of her compositions; but, as I continue listening, I keep remembering one of my favorite mottos coined by John Cage and Merce Cunningham: “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t!”