Masquerade

Composition and premiere: Anna Clyne composed Masquerade on a BBC commission for the 2013 BBC Proms. The BBC Symphony Orchestra led by Marin Alsop gave the first performance on the Last Night of the Proms, September 7, 2013, in Royal Albert Hall. This is the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of Anna Clyne’s music. (The Boston University Tanglewood Institute performed Masquerade earlier this summer in Ozawa Hall, led by Mei-Ann Chen.)

Anna Clyne was born in London and studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where she studied with Marina Adamia, before attending the Manhattan School of Music for her master’s degree in composition. At Manhattan she worked with composer Julia Wolfe, co-founder of the New York City-based composer/performer collective Bang on a Can; Clyne was a Bang on a Can Summer Festival Fellow in 2005, and became a vital part of the New York City’s new music community; her work featured frequently on Bang on a Can programs. She now lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York.

A busy and prolific composer, Clyne was composer-in-residence, along with Mason Bates, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra 2010-15. Among the works she wrote for the CSO was her evocative orchestral work Night Ferry (2012), which caught the orchestral world’s attention. Her violin concerto the seamstress (2015) was composed for the CSO and soloist Jennifer Koh. Conductor Marin Alsop has been a strong supporter, instigating commissions for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival, and for the Taki Concordia Orchestra for performance during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Alsop led the BBC Proms premiere of Masquerade with the BBC Symphony; the BBC Symphony’s recording of that piece and four others, including Night Ferry and also featuring conductors Andrew Litton and Sakari Oramo, was released on the all-Clyne album Mythologies in 2020. She has written two concertante pieces for solo cello (her own main instrument) and ensemble: Shorthand for cello and strings for Eric Jacobsen and the Orlando Philharmonic (2020) and DANCE for cello and full orchestra, given its premiere by Inbal Segev and conductor Cristian Măcelaru at the Cabrillo Festival in 2019 and later recorded by Segev with Marin Alsop and the London Philharmonic. A new clarinet concerto for Martin Fröst and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra will be premiered in 2023. Clyne is also active as a composer of chamber, vocal, and electroacoustic music, as well as music for the stage.

Clyne has this to say about Masquerade:

Masquerade draws inspiration from the original mid-18th-century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens. As is true today, these concerts were a place where people from all walks of life mingled to enjoy a wide array of music. Other forms of entertainment ranged from the sedate to the salacious with acrobatics, exotic street entertainers, dancers, fireworks and masquerades. I am fascinated by the historic and sociological courtship between music and dance. Combined with costumes, masked guises and elaborate settings, masquerades created an exciting, yet controlled, sense of occasion and celebration. It is this that I wish to evoke in Masquerade.

The work derives its material from two melodies. For the main theme, I imagined a chorus welcoming the audience and inviting them into their imaginary world. The second theme, Juice of Barley, is an old English country dance melody and drinking song, which first appeared in John Playford’s 1695 edition of The English Dancing Master.

It is an honor to compose music for the Last Night of the Proms and I dedicate Masquerade to the Prommers.

Clyne’s music often converses with styles and ideas from the past, not so much as pastiche but as a recontextualization or redrawing of familiar musical images. Taking its cue from the “Proms” idea of the commission, her five-minute, single-movement Masquerade combines the imagery of a festival, multilayered outdoor activity with familiar musical ideas smeared and reconfigured into new ways of sounding. The chromatic falling sequence that dominates the piece, already slightly tipsy-sounding, is continually disrupted and supplanted, shifting suddenly to different material equally short-lived. Using completely different musical ideas, the effect is a little like the fragmented opening Shrovetide Fair scene in Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.