“Each miniature invites the listener into intensely private worlds which shimmer with light and colour.”
Steph Power
Youth EP, composed by Edmund Finnis and performed by Clare Hammond, received an outstanding 5-star review from BBC Music Magazine!
“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.
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’.”
Steph Power
