Night Songs (2012)

Helen Grime's five-minute 'Night Songs' faithfully re-creates a Knussen-type sound-world, and it too comes over like an oceanic tone-poem, though with a lighter touch.

Composed to mark Knussen’s 60th birthday, Night Songs is inspired by a work of the same name by the late artist Joseph Cornell, one of his well-known assemblages. Things felt perilous near the start, however, where the oboe- & trumpet-guided introduction led to a frantic, hopping texture that would not be out of place in one of Knussen’s own compositions (it brings to mind the first of his Whitman Settings, another nocturnal piece); for just a moment, Grime’s act of homage seems as though it might tip over into quasi-quotation. But Night Songs quickly pulls away, venturing instead through an episode of melodic searching before entering into genuinely nebulous territory. Only briefly, though; once again the piece moves on, Grime creating an interesting sense of momentum but not through blatantly rapid material, as though something deeper (unheard?) were impelling the orchestral movement. As it progresses, Night Songs grows in density & darkness, some flute flurries marking the end of the presence of high registers in the piece. Solitary bass notes begin the descent in the work’s final passage, increasingly solemn & pensive; a final bit of melodic moving around swiftly disappears, & everything becomes slow & mysterious, seemingly poised, where it ends.

...the premiere of Night Songs (2012) provided a welcome opportunity to hear this most fastidious among younger British composers working on a substantial canvas. Not that that applied to the piece’s length – its resourceful interplay of shifting timbres and superimposed tempos unfolding in just over five minutes, though Knussen used the apparent absence of his glasses as a ruse for a second performance which, though only a matter of a few seconds longer, gave the music audibly greater room to expand as the fading echoes of its only significant tutti passage resounded across the evocative textures towards a deft final dispersal.