Born in London, Anna Clyne has been a resident of the United States for more than two decades, currently making her home in upstate New York.  She is one of the most frequently performed composers of her generation, acclaimed for her innovative use of melody and her virtuosic use of the orchestra.  This Midnight Hour was co-commissioned by the Orchestre National d’Île-de-France and the Seattle Symphony and premiered in the town of Plaisir, France, on November 13, 2015, under the direction of Enrique Mazzola.

A great deal happens in the course of this 15-minute composition.  There are some wild forces at work but one also experiences some tender romantic moments.  These two emotional poles are captured in two poems Clyne quoted in her score as an epigraph.  The first one is by the Nobel Prize-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) that reads in its entirety, in Robert Bly’s translation:

Music–
a naked woman
running mad through the pure night

The other poem is Evening Harmony by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), which at one point evokes a “melancholy waltz and languid vertigo.”  

Balancing between madness and languor, Clyne constructed what one critic fittingly described as “a noirish nocturne.”  The piece opens rather darkly, with a vigorous rhythmic ostinato in the lower strings.  The nervous energy keeps increasing–occasionally interrupted by sudden rests–until a new section begins (“beautiful but eerie,” the score says).   After a “dark and ominous” and a “ferocious” episode, the tension is finally relieved by the appearance of the “melancholy waltz.”  But there is something oddly disturbing about this nostalgic melody:  Clyne has half of the viola section playing the tune a quarter-tone sharp, to create a “muddier” sound.  Both the hectic and the languorous music then return, until the latter is abruptly cut off by an “aggressive” drumstroke.