One of the greatest composers of my generation for sure.
A very special sound world created with enormous care by one of my favourite young composers, Edmund Finnis. He wears his confidence lightly and his music is exquisitely wrought and detailed and sensitively balanced.
the sounds being made by new composers like Edmund Finnis are very intriguing
Edmund Finnis is one of the most interesting and exciting British composers around. He creates a completely unique and emotionally affecting sound-world
Edmund Finnis is a composer who creates glistening, dancing music with an air of diffident mystery. It’s mentally tough, often focusing on just a few elements which are carefully weighed and transformed. But the sounds themselves are delicate and glowing, with an intriguing quality of being familiar and strange at once.
A rising star, the British composer [Edmund Finnis] seems to make the very air shimmer with his music.
Verbo Domini
...an exquisite plangent prayer in close dense harmony with a rising soprano solo
Veneer
Edmund Finnis' Veneer stirred magical cries from Paul Silverthorne's reverberating viola.
The Centre is Everywhere
Filling the stage in an egalitarian formation of a semicircle, Manchester Collective performed Edmund Finnis’ The Centre is Everywhere, an interwoven texture of 12 independent voices that created a shifting foreground of dynamic arching lines, washing over and converging in cascades of harmony, petering out into the texture of white noise.
The Air, Turning
fascinating... exquisitely scored ... an intriguing disc of a composer to watch.
The Air, Turning
With sumptuous Russian music dominating this BBC SSO programme, the breeziness of Edmund Finnis’s The Air, Turning made for an ideal opener. Conductor Ilan Volkov gradually built up the full spectrum of string sound, from the bottom bass notes to eerie violin harmonics, which was then finely smudged with woodwind and brass colour.
The Air, Turning
It was the premiere in this concert that struck me most ...a very distinctive voice that I’d like to encounter again. I found it very atmospheric, and quite magical.
The Air, Turning
Inspired by Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s Finding the Keys, this piece was an ethereally beautiful exploration of the transient nature of the wind and its interactions with the natural world.
The Air, Turning
highly effective...shimmering colours and intriguing ideas
The Air, Turning
***** The music of Edmund Finnis invites rather than demands attention - and the more it is given, the more its gifts unfold. Born in 1984, Finnis has an almost synaesthetic ability to paint delicate yet robust, translucent sonic worlds that combine broad, brush-stroke gestures with tiny nuances of sound. Each work on this exquisite debut disc is, in effect, a constantly changing prism in which surface and depth are revealed in tactile, mutual oscillation. The opening title track, The Air, Turning aptly describes the whole as it does this shimmering score. Where does Parallel Colour stop and Between Rain begin? The former is cast in seven, beautifully sculpted sections around a central double bass while the latter hints at darkness underlying its subtle string tensions. Shades Lengthen completes a beguiling quartet of larger ensemble pieces. Captivating, too, is Four Duets, in which clarinettist Mark Simpson and pianist Víkingur Ólafsson ebb and flow in lovely circles - while Eloisa-Fleur Thom's breathtaking solo violin takes the listener Elsewhere indeed.
The Air, Turning
Among the latest issues in NMC’s debut series is The Air, Turning, a striking collection of works by Edmund Finnis, born in 1984 and a former pupil of Julian Anderson. There is orchestral music played the BBC Scottish Symphony under Ilan Volkov, ensemble pieces for BCMG and the Britten Sinfonia and solo pieces here, all showing not only how fastidiously Finnis constructs his music, and how cannily he selects and adapts his musical models, but also revealing his precious ability to transform the most straightforward musical objects, sometimes even a single chord, into something richly mysterious and compelling
Shades Lengthen
a beautiful new chamber violin concerto... Commissioned by London Music Masters and the Boltini Trust and played with mesmerising lyricism by Benjamin Beilman, the piece has an elegiac quality that reflects its title, with detunings and rich Tippettian counterpoint.
Seeing is Flux
a graceful piece by Edmund Finnis ... its featherlight strands deftly laced together.
Seeing is Flux
Notable was the level of technical accomplishment in works conceived in diverse styles and mostly produced by a younger generation of composers. Premiered as the final concert's centrepiece, Edmund Finnis's Seeing Is Flux takes its title from the American novelist Siri Hustvedt, its layered textures and ambiguous blend of innocence and sophistication demonstrating a keen ear for sonority skilfully deployed throughout a neat and effective structure; conductor Baldur Brönnimann held its iridescent surface up to the light in what proved to be a compelling reading.
Parallel Colour
The symmetrical construction of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's latest programme reflected the symmetry of the amazing work premiered at the heart of it.... Latest in the long line of BCMG's spectacularly successful Sound Investment commissions, Edmund Finnis' Parallel Colour employs two virtually identical ensembles, facing each other, with a lone double-bass as the linking king-pin. In some ways this symmetry goes back to the two orchestras of Bach's St Matthew Passion, and though Bach uses his forces for dramatic and contrasting ends, here Finnis sees his own more as vehicles for repetition and refraction, as mirror-like as the confluence of sea and sky on a still horizon. There is sheer beauty in the timbres he creates - subdued, sometimes ethereal - and only towards the too-soon-reached end is there a slight livening-up of activity. [...] its effect was totally magical. Richard Baker conducted a willing BCMG in this premiere of what I would dare to declare a masterpiece in the genre.
Parallel Colour
striking delicacy ...music of simply stunning beauty... exquisitely handled ... extremely impressive.... the most magical music of the evening
Panufnik Variations
My absolute favourite of all of them was the ravishing Variation No.10 by Edmund Finnis...wonderful
Panufnik Variations
ingenious... The variation by Finnis was brimming with erotic energy as it moved through diaphanous forms ...a graceful precursor to Debussy’s La mer.
in situ
Elegant, shapely, cool in its timbres ... the piece deserves to slip into any imaginative programme.
Flicker
Now in his mid-twenties, Edmund Finnis has recently worked in dance and electro-acoustics though lacks nothing in terms of an orchestral sense. Over the course of its 8 minutes, Flicker (2008) touches on a variety of pithy yet distinctive motifs, given coherence by a secure formal grasp (both the culmination and conclusion of the piece were unobtrusively evident) and definition through the skilful deployment of timbre and texture. Lucidly rendered by the GSO, it gave notice of a creative talent of whom one looks forward to hearing more.
Flicker
The flickering of his work was almost visible, indeed: there was tension during the pauses – silences were loaded; woodwinds were obdurate in their superimposing musical fragments; fiery strings cast an electronic shadow on the musical texture – sometimes recalling an electric instrument’s feedback. Stinging metallic trumpets tore everything into pieces and, paraphrasing Ed Finnis’ comments in the programme notes, the tottering and insistent quality of the musical patterns moved forward with an ‘unsettling lack of inherent memory of what has gone before’. …the overall impression was of a quivering satisfaction. And the mid air ending was, to quote a friend of mine, 'just genius'.
Flicker
Entitled Flicker owing to its constantly changing surface texture, Finnis's composition exhibits sharp contrasts of mood varying between exuberance and mystery …it made an excellent showcase for the orchestra.
Aloysius
...an Aldeburgh festival commission from Edmund Finnis... Given its affecting affecting rocking patterns, expressive musings on gravely beautiful polyphony by Byrd, and the natural ease of its writing for strings, I now look forward to Quartets 2, 3 and 4.
Aloysius
A delicate five-movement work full of poetry