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HELEN GRIME
ENSEMBLE
Seven Pierrot Miniatures (2010)*
1 I (The Clouds)
Cormac Henry flute (tracks 1, 3–5, 7), piccolo (tracks 2, 6)
Katherine Bryer oboe (tracks 15–19)
Yann Ghiro clarinet (tracks 1–4, 7–10), bass clarinet (tracks 5–6)
Stephen Stirling horn (tracks 21–23)
Jo Hensel horn (tracks 21–23)
James Willshire piano (tracks 1–10, 15–20)
22 II. Rhythmic and exuberant
23 III. From a distance
Into the Faded Air (2007)
Lento
Tracks 1–23 are premiere recordings
Zoë Beyers violin (tracks 1–2, 4–7, 11–14, 24–27)
Sarah Bevan-Baker violin (tracks 24–27)
Scott Dickinson viola (tracks 3, 8–14, 24–27)
Catherine Marwood viola (tracks 24–27)
William Conway cello (tracks 1–7, 24–27)
Christian Elliott cello (tracks 24–27) This recording was made possible thanks to the support of:
‘Human activity must impose limits upon itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.’
This well-known statement from Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music is especially relevant to Helen Grime’s chamber music. Born in York in 1981 to Scottish parents, but raised in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, Grime’s career has often been measured according to the success of her large-scale orchestral works, which include Virga (2007), Near Midnight (2012), Woven Space (2017) and, more recently, Meditations on Joy, premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in February 2023.
Nevertheless, running in parallel with these more ‘high-profile’ commissions is an equally significant body of important chamber works. These smaller-scale compositions present Grime’s music in an altogether more rarefied, nuanced, intimate and – in many respects – more alluring light. Over two decades, Grime has evolved a stylistic language whereby the rich tapestry of timbres, colours and textures provides the music with its distinct atmosphere and ambience. This ‘troposphere’ of sounds has been described by the writer John Fallas as the music’s ‘weather system’: an ecosystem of interconnected elements that give each composition its sense of presence, sonic identity and particular climate.
These qualities play an essential role in all of Grime’s music, but are distilled and refined in the chamber works. Their presence is somehow intensified as a result: it’s as if the self-imposed limitations brought about through writing for smaller combinations of instruments – solo, duo, trio, quintet and sextet – free up the composer’s imagination (to return to Stravinsky’s paradox). The medium of chamber music can therefore be seen to have unleashed a creative energy and drive in Grime’s musical language that captures and preserves many of its salient features in their purest form.
‘Impression’ prompts one to think of impressionism, of course – the well-known artistic movement which emerged around the turn of the twentieth century in the music of composers such as Debussy and Ravel. While parallels certainly exist between their music and Grime’s, the Scottish composer’s understanding of the term is very much her own: a musical impressionism firmly rooted in the present day rather than belonging to the past.
A further connection with impressionism is seen in Grime’s engagement with nature and the natural world – an interest that has provided the creative spark for several works featured on this album. The titles of several compositions illustrate nature’s impact on
Grime’s musical thinking, whether relating to qualities associated with the outside world, such as the sky (Into the Faded Air), the seasons and times of year (To See the Summer Sky, Snow and Snow), or the unique topography of the Scottish landscape (Five North-Eastern Scenes, Braid Hills).
Other artforms and artistic movements have also informed Grime’s music, whether in the form of poetry (Walter Scott in Harp of the North, T.S. Eliot in Into the Faded Air, Ted Hughes in Snow and Snow, Alexander McCall Smith in Braid Hills), theatre (Seven Pierrot Miniatures) or painting (Joan Eardley in Five North-Eastern Scenes). Such extra-musical stimuli only serve as starting points, however. Grime has emphasised that the music ‘is very much led by the musical material … what the piece wants to become’. The music ultimately follows its own course and destiny: the rest is, indeed, extra.
The earliest composition included on this recording, Harp of the North for solo piano, already points the way. Grime’s multidimensional exploration of the piano’s texture – whereby its high, middle and low ranges are somehow held in play throughout the piece’s five-minute duration – is reminiscent of the way Debussy and Ravel used its timbres to suggest the sound of a full orchestra or to imitate percussion instruments.
Impressionist influences in Harp of the North extend to the mellifluous quality of its interweaving lines, its shimmering, resonating harmonies and sense of rhythmic freedom, as heard in the opening section of the piece. Flowing melodic patterns weave kaleidoscopic traceries around a fixed high C sharp, which acts like a gravitational force, pushing and pulling the musical material this way and that.
The four-movement Into the Faded Air, for string sextet, also takes its title from a poem (fittingly, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – itself a work engaged with the idea of chamber music), but appears to evoke the qualities of the outdoor world in a more direct way than Harp of the North. The opening movement springs into sudden life with two sets of trios (both comprising one each of violin, viola and cello) vying for ascendancy. These multitudinous particles of sound recede during the slow second movement. Beginning with a series of duets between the two violas, their role is gradually taken over by the two pairs of violins and cellos. An agitated third movement threads an almost continuous line throughout the sextet in crisscrossing patterns that increase in dramatic intensity, while a choralelike final movement imitates the plangent sound of the seventeenth-century viol consort – the ensemble now split down the middle in a two-violins-plus-viola versus two-cellos-plusviola formation, before fading into silence.
The mellifluous quality that is often found in Grime’s melodic lines – linear patterns that evolve organically from the seed of a previous idea or set of ideas – is also heard in the three-movement Snow and Snow for clarinet, viola and piano. Here, the first movement begins with a series of undulating patterns passed back and forth between clarinet and viola. These echoing exchanges, which become increasingly animated, are eventually disrupted by the piano’s sudden entry after the one-minute mark. It signals its arrival with a persistent repeated-note idea, which is then taken over and developed by the clarinet and viola.
The febrile atmosphere conjured in the opening movement is heightened further in a stormy second, whose dark Sturm und Drang-like chiaroscuros eventually give way to a powerful avalanche of falling lines and crashing chords. A short final movement sees the music return to the shifting moods and uneasy atmosphere of the opening.
Powerful moments also appear in To See the Summer Sky, for violin and viola, although the tone is in general brighter and more positive than in Snow and Snow. A shimmering, ethereal quality imbues the first movement, while the second is propelled by an energetic dance between violin and viola, the former’s pointed interjections punctuated by pulsing pizzicato lines in the latter. Both instruments
intertwine to create a kind of suspended animation in the opening of the third, before viscerally breaking apart in a frantic middle section – rapid fistfuls of notes in the viola’s low range pitted against a sweeping, soaring melody high in the violin. The third movement concludes with a nod towards the opening of the work, before the work closes with a propulsive, Bartókian fourth movement that ends almost as soon as it has begun.
A more resigned, reflective atmosphere is conjured in Five North-Eastern Scenes, for oboe and piano. The change in mood may have been brought about by Grime’s interest in Joan Eardley’s paintings, whose snowy landscapes capture the bleak beauty of north-east Scotland during the winter months. However, the work’s more contemplative nature may also owe something to the work’s dedicatee, oboist Robin Miller – with whom Grime studied during the 1990s at the City of Edinburgh Music School and at St Mary's Music School, Edinburgh – who had sadly passed away in 2014, two years before the work’s composition.
A pregnant stillness pervades the first and third ‘scenes’. More abrasive clashes are heard in the second, while in the fourth the music oscillates sharply between movement and stasis, loud and quiet moments, calmness and chaos. A bleak mood hangs over the processional fifth and final scene,
which ends with a poignant melody in the oboe’s low register against slowly falling chorale-like chords in the piano.
In these so-called ‘landscape’ works, Grime does not use atmosphere as a means of providing the music with a ‘setting’. Instead, it forms an essential part of the music’s fabric. Grime sculpts sound in ways that leaves the listener with an indelible audible impression – an impression that often remains fixed in listeners’ minds long after the music recedes into silence. Perhaps the most immediate expression of this aesthetic can be found in the recent, epigrammatic Braid Hills, for two French horns. The three-movement composition covers a lot of ground in barely five minutes and is especially successful in utilising the horn’s pastoral qualities and associations as an ‘outdoor’ instrument. The opening movement’s rising and falling lines suggest different vantage points – either looking up at a hill or down from its summit – while the second’s ‘pass-the-parcel’ canon is full of bucolic freshness and ruddy-cheeked cheeriness. The third movement marries the natural world with music’s ‘natural’ sound qualities by employing pitches derived solely from the horn’s harmonic series, thus generating some sappy microtonal clashes between the two instruments.
On one level, Seven Pierrot Miniatures is something of an outlier in this collection.
Commissioned by Hebrides Ensemble, who have done much to promote Grime’s chamber music over the years, and drawing on seven poems by Albert Giraud (whose texts also inspired the work’s clear predecessor, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire), the work is more a portrayal of Pierrot as commedia dell’arte character than a representation of a specific scene or image. As Grime has noted, a mirror-like quality characterises its sevenmovement form, with the odd-numbered movements closely related in terms of both their melancholy mood and use of shared musical material. The pocket-sized second movement and equally explosive sixth draw on the more mischievous and occasionally malevolent aspects of Pierrot’s personality, while the fourth lies somewhere in between the two extremes of mania and melancholia, serving as what Grime calls a ‘pivot point’ where the music’s ‘surreal’ and ‘shimmering’ calmness is juxtaposed with more violent outbursts. Yet even a cursory glance at the descriptive words appended in brackets after each movement number (and which identify the specific poems underlying each movement in turn) – with their references to ‘clouds’, ‘decor’, ‘church’ and ‘sunset’ –suggests a series of painterly images recalling the work of Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. Which brings us back to the analogy between music, art and poetry. Grime’s chamber
music often compels the listener to inhabit the microcosmic world revealed within its carefully sculpted lines, shapes and detailed brushstrokes, where subtlety and nuance combine with precision and grace. At other moments, however, Grime suddenly zooms out of the details to reveal the fuller picture – the panoramic view. By keeping in check this delicate balance between micro and macro, detail and overall design, concept and
execution, we can start to grasp the poetry in motion that infuses Helen Grime’s powerful, unique and evocative music.
© 2025 Pwyll ap Siôn
Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University. He has written widely about contemporary music, and contributes regularly to Gramophone as a writer and reviewer.
Recorded on 23-25 February 2024 at St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington (tracks 1–20, 24–27) and on 11 July 2024 in the Royal Hospital School, Ipswich (tracks 21–23)
Producer/Engineer (tracks 1–20, 24–27): Jack Davis
Producer/Engineer (tracks 21–23): Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mixing & mastering: Paul Baxter
Cover image: Henrik Dønnestad / Unsplash
Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK
www.delphianrecords.com
Hebrides Ensemble
With programmes that are diverse, imaginative and inspiring, Hebrides Ensemble has established itself as one of the foremost chamber music collectives in the UK. Cofounded and led by its Artistic Director, the cellist and conductor William Conway, the Ensemble is renowned for its fresh and intelligent approach to programming, which places contemporary music at the heart of a diverse range of repertoire.
The Ensemble’s strength is its flexibility; it draws its performers from a pool of the most outstanding musicians in the UK and beyond, ensuring the exceptional performance standards for which it has become renowned. This is an international ensemble with its roots in Scottish culture, a collective which performs regularly at venues and festivals throughout the UK and Europe and is regularly featured in broadcasts for BBC Radio 3.
In recent years, the Ensemble has given premieres at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, at Kings Place and Wigmore Hall in London, and at the Aldeburgh, Lammermuir, Edinburgh International and St Magnus
festivals. Hebrides Horizons supports the next generation of performers, composers, artistic directors and cultural leaders through its mentoring programme, and Hebrides Digital allows audiences around the world to be part of every performance the Ensemble gives, using livestreaming and cutting-edge digital technology.
The present recording is the sixth in a series of critically acclaimed composer portrait albums released in partnership with Delphian Records. Previous volumes of the Scotland’s Composers Series featured music by Stuart MacRae, Judith Weir, Nigel Osborne, Peter Maxwell Davies (EVM Award for New Music Recording of the Year at the 2018 Scottish Awards for New Music) and the premiere recording of James MacMillan’s Since it was the day of Preparation …, which went straight to No 1 in the Specialist Classical Chart upon release in July 2016.
Hebrides Ensemble thanks Creative Scotland for its continued support through the National Lottery Extended Programme Fund.
hebridesensemble.com
Hebrides Ensemble on Delphian – Scotland’s Composers Series
Stuart MacRae: Chamber Music
Hebrides Ensemble; Joshua Ellicott tenor, Marcus Farnsworth baritone DCD34258
This compelling survey of music by Stuart MacRae – Volume 5 in Hebrides Ensemble’s ‘Scotland’s Composers Series’ – focuses on MacRae’s works of the last decade while also reaching back to include two pieces from the composer’s mid-twenties. Reflecting diverse inspirations from nature and myth, it also reveals underlying continuities: a preoccupation, in particular, with questions of scale and perspective. The ancient Greek hero Prometheus receives an unexpectedly intimate portrait, his human aspects to the fore –flawed yet sympathetic. MacRae’s perception of the natural world, meanwhile, extends from the microscopic scale of lichen to the vastness of the night sky, in which the medium of distance transmutes all turmoil into calm.
‘This beautifully performed composer portrait … captures MacRae at his most searching’ — BBC Music Magazine, May 2022, FIVE STARS
Hebrides Ensemble on Delphian – Scotland’s Composers Series
Also available on Delphian
James MacMillan: Since it was the day of Preparation … Brindley Sherratt bass, Synergy Vocals, Hebrides Ensemble
DCD34168
This first release in Hebrides Ensemble and Delphian Records’ ‘Scotland’s Composers Series’ presents Sir James MacMillan’s extraordinary setting – by turns intimate and dramatic – of the Resurrection story as told in St John’s Gospel. As at the work’s premiere at the 2012 Edinburgh International Festival, the Ensemble and its director William Conway (the work’s dedicatee) are joined by bass Brindley Sherratt in the role of Christ, and by a pristine quartet of singers from Synergy Vocals.
‘extraordinarily affecting ... It broaches enduring universal issues and, in this wonderfully committed recording, already feels like a modern masterpiece’
— BBC Music Magazine, July 2016
dream.risk.sing: elevating women’s voices
Samantha Crawford, Lana Bode
DCD34279
Conceived by soprano Samantha Crawford and pianist Lana Bode with the aim of telling often unheard stories about womanhood primarily through women’s own words and music, dream.risk.sing brings together songs about adolescence, bodies, love, work and legacy, while a palpable thread running throughout reminds listeners of the constraints on freedom that still exist in women’s lives. Bringing forward this subject matter – far from the staple of traditional song recitals – has involved Crawford and Bode in commissioning new music and reviving other, often unfamiliar repertoire, and the album includes a new song-cycle by Charlotte Bray, new arrangements of two songs from Judith Weir’s groundbreaking cycle woman. life.song, recent works by Helen Grime, Libby Larsen and others, as well as earlier twentieth-century contributions from Rebecca Clarke and Florence Price.
‘witty, poignant and candid … Crawford’s big, bright voice packs a tremendous punch, with diction always crystal-clear and plenty of bite when required (which is often)’
— Presto Music, October 2023, EDITOR’S CHOICE
