Those au fait with the music of Edmund Finnis via releases such as ‘The Air, Turning’ (NMC, 4/19) and ‘Shades’ (Bedroom Community, 2022) will already be familiar with the composer’s fondness for cyclical forms that shift and evolve organically, and open-ended patterns and processes that seem to take on a life of their own. On one level, these ‘Finnisisms’ (for want of a better word) imbue the music with a mechanical, almost impersonal quality, yet under its polished, translucent surface lies a more deeply personal and expressive voice. This is especially evident in the two works for solo piano contained on this latest EP of Finnis’s music.

Composed in 2017, Youth comprises 10 short pieces (barely over a minute long in most cases) that draw in an almost Proustian way on Finnis’s own childhood memories. Mendelssohn’s Kinderszenen immediately springs to mind, with the opening movement, ‘Bloom’, even taking on some of the Romantic work’s harmonic, rhythmic and textural qualities. Nevertheless, Finnis’s biographical snapshots give the appearance of having been refracted through the lens of the composer’s own present-day thoughts on youth’s loss and disappearance. In other words, Youth exudes a more ‘grown-up’ visualisation of childhood in general.

The cycle gains much from its ability to contrast the boundless energy of youth, depicted through moto perpetuo-style movements such as ‘Spin’, ‘Stream of Days’ and ‘Buren’ (named after the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren), with moments of stasis and introspection, as heard in ‘Frankenthaler’ (named after another painter, American abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler), ‘Heath’ and the Debussy-like ‘Hammershøi Windows’. It also gains much from Clare Hammond’s exquisite performance. Hammond has known Finnis since his studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and the other piece contained on this recording, the beautiful Lullaby for Emmeline, was written and dedicated to the pianist and her husband after the birth of their baby daughter. As Hammond has noted, a special glow and sonic lustre come across in Finnis’s music, above and beyond the structures and systems that underpin it, as this mini-album demonstrates in abundance.