Clare Hammond (piano)
Pentatone PTC 5187 197 (Digital EP)
16:30 mins
Memory, image, sensation and sound – in Youth (2017), Edmund Finnis brings these elements simply but rapturously together to form what is, remarkably, his first ever composition for solo piano. A cycle of ten miniatures, the piece was commissioned by pianist Clare Hammond, who matches perfectly their balance of wonder, reflection and playful flashes of heat in coolly compressed, ambiguous emotion.
The pair first talked of collaborating while still effectively youths themselves, fellow postgrads at London’s Guildhall. Yet the intervening years lend the cycle a sense of wisdom and gently self-aware nostalgia that can only come with experience. Dedicated to Finnis’s nieces and nephews, it’s followed by the brief but exquisite Lullaby for Emmeline (2018), written for the birth of Hammond’s second child and forming here a kind of tender coda.
Each miniature invites the listener into intensely private worlds which shimmer with light and colour. Many of the cycle’s individual titles are unknowable – yet to what ‘Bloom’ and ‘Spin’ may specifically refer is incidental to their respective piquant arpeggios and asymmetric chords, the latter finally tumbling suggestively down the keyboard.
Central are the homages to visual artists threaded throughout, of which ‘Frankenthaler’ is perhaps key. Finnis has described the abstract expressionist’s ‘radiant colour fields on canvasses that, despite being flat, seem to extend for miles’. His response seems an echo in sound, while ‘Hammershøi Windows’ pours its own light through textures elegant as the artist’s celebrated interiors, and ‘Buren’ beautifully evokes the sunbeam-wrought patterns beloved of the once-called ‘stripe guy’.