anna clyne

Anna Clyne: This Midnight Hour – programme note and profile (LSO)

Anna Clyne: This Midnight Hour – programme note and profile (LSO)

As with so many of Anna Clyne’s orchestral works, This Midnight Hour takes inspiration from nonmusical sources, in this case two poems. The first is Charles Baudelaire’s much-anthologised ‘Harmonie du soir’ (Evening Harmony) from the 1857 collection Les fleurs du mal. Stuffed with sensory observations and evocative similes – floral scent, tortured violins, a drowning, blood-clotted sun – the poem comprises a series of woozy repetitions that fold in on themselves like a hall of mirrors …