In Wednesday’s (5/4) Baltimore Sun, Tim Smith writes about composer Anna Clyne and her work Abstractions, which the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra premieres this weekend “as part of a program celebrating women in music.… Clyne was commissioned to compose a work for the BSO and music director Marin Alsop in honor of Baltimore philanthropists Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, major supporters of the orchestra and its OrchKids educational project. The commission came from their friend Bonnie McElveen-Hunter…. The composer also was introduced to Meyerhoff’s highly regarded private art collection of modern masterworks.… That exposure helped to generate Clyne’s Abstractions. The score is in five movements, each related to a piece of art, including the late Ellsworth Kelly’s bold black-and-white lithograph ‘River II’ from 2005 and a 1980 photographic seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto. ‘Art has a color palette that can be translated…into harmonies and orchestration, but my intention was not to be literal,’ Clyne says.” Clyne “has served as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and other major organizations.” The Baltimore Symphony gave the East Coast premiere of her work Masquerade last fall, and “has more Clyne in its future. Next season, the BSO will perform ‘Within Her Arms.’ ”
Posted May 4, 2016
Anna Clyne photo by Nancy Stone
