Helen Grime: Night Songs — a finely textured, poetic debut

NMC, founded by Colin Matthews to support living composers, is celebrating its 25th birthday with an outpouring of new releases and classic reissues. Helen Grime’s Night Songs is the latest in the Debut Discs series. Of the works here several allude to poetry: the Clarinet Concerto (Baudelaire), Into the Faded Air (TS Eliot), A Cold Spring (Elizabeth Bishop), Everyone Sang (Sassoon) and Near Midnight (DH Lawrence). The writing is finely textured, dense but airy, ornamental but never decorative. Born in 1981, this highly assured and distinctive composer has an expanding reputation: Night Songs was a BBC Proms commission in 2012 and she is now associate composer of the Hallé Orchestra. No wonder these musicians play her music so expertly.