Listen & Watch

London Sinfonietta Music Streams: complete recordings from live performances exclusively for listening to online.

Edmund Finnis Unfolds

Helen Keen flute/alto flute/piccolo
Mark van de Wiel clarinets
Michael Thompson horn
Jonathan Morton violin
Tim Gill cello

Unfolds is a London Sinfonietta commission generated through the London Sinfonietta's Writing the Future scheme.

This recording features the world premiere of Unfolds, recorded live at Southbank Centre on Saturday 5 November 2011.

Writing the Future is generously supported by The Boltini Trust, The John S Cohen Foundation, Anthony Mackintosh and Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner.

Edmund Finnis’ mind was on three non-musical influences while composing this piece: the shimmering grid paintings of Agnes Martin, the near-weightless and transparent architecture of Junya Ishigami, and Italo Calvino’s 1985 lecture on ‘Lightness’ in his Six Memos forthe Next Millennium. To Finnis, both Martin and Ishigami seem to be reaching for something akin to the ideal of ‘thoughtful lightness’that Calvino describes. This is not lightness in the sense of frivolity or superficiality, but rather the ‘subtraction of weight’ that can bring about clarity, flexibility, precision… a letting-in of light. They create work whose subtle, elegant forms invite the perceptionof fine detail. The connections between these influences led Finnis to compose a piece characterised by delicate reiterative musicalpatterns (sometimes heard in sequence, sometimes superimposed) and an absence of bass or loud sounds.

Programme note © Edmund Finnis.

Image © Anne Harild.