New realms of composition through art and poetry– composer Anna Clyne announces Autumn/ Winter season

Anna Clyne’s Autumn/Winter season includes:

• New York premiere of PALETTE by the Juilliard Orchestra, a seven-movement work for Augmented Orchestra (AO) composed using technology devised by Anna Clyne and Jody Elff

• Debut art exhibition at Juilliard Station, showcasing artworks created alongside PALETTE

• New portrait album – Abstractions – with Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to be released on Naxos, featuring works inspired by poetry and art

• The Years to receive London premiere by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Danish National Concert Choir at the BBC Proms

• The Sixteen give final performances of critically acclaimed work Orbits for solo violin and choir, including Scottish premiere at Greyfriars’s Kirk, Edinburgh

• DANCE celebrates over 12 million streams on Spotify, with performances across Europe and North America featuring cellists Jan Vogler, Camille Thomas and Inbal Segev

• Regional premieres of Glasslands featuring saxophonist Jess Gillam, in London, Sweden and Germany

• Pekka Kuusisto leads Australian premiere of violin concerto Time and Tides

Over the coming months, Anna Clyne – ‘a radical melodist with a painter’s eye’ (NPR) – showcases a number of new works expressing her passion for the creative arts and cross-genre collaborations, in addition to embracing technology and techniques providing immersive sonic experiences for audiences.

As one of the most in-demand composers today, Clyne’s forthcoming season sees major instrumentalists and orchestras presenting her music to audiences across the globe, as well as the release of Abstractions – a new portrait album on the Naxos label –featuring the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop.

Clyne will also make her exhibition debut as a visual artist, with seven canvases created for her composition PALETTE to be placed on display at Juilliard Station from August – October. The exhibition coincides with the New York premiere of PALETTE, which will open the Juilliard School’s Second Annual Fall Festival.

London Premiere of The Years at the BBC Proms (21 August)

The Years, written by Clyne during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a reflection on the unprecedented shared experience of enforced isolation. The music ranges from quiet solitude to the alarm of a system being fractured, with the hope to create music that resonates with that moment in time, but also with any moment in time – both past and future.

The work receives its London premiere at the BBC Proms on 21 August, with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Danish National Concert Choir, conducted by Fabio Luisi.

DANCE celebrates over 12 million streams on Spotify and performances by Jan Vogler (12, 13 & 14 September), Camille Thomas and Inbal Segev

Globally celebrated cello concerto DANCE, which has been described as ‘unfailingly lyrical’ (The Arts Fuse), celebrates over 12 million streams on Spotify in a recording by cellist Inbal Segev and conductor Marin Alsop with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The work, composed by Clyne in 2019 is based on a poem by Rumi, with each movement based on a different line of the poem:

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

DANCE will tour across Virginia with the conductor Eric Jacobsen and cellist Jan Vogler with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra on 12, 13 & 14 September; in two performances in Germany with soloist Camille Thomas under the baton of Nicholas Milton alongside the Göttinger Symphonieorchester on 26 September & 1 October and touring to London, Warwick and Nottingham with performances by Segev and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain led by Alexandre Bloch on 4, 5 & 6 January.

New York premiere of PALETTE (18 September) and debut art exhibition

As a visual artist, Clyne works with a number of mediums to express what colours, shapes and textures can be evoked through sound. PALETTE, a recent Concerto for Augmented Orchestra, saw the creation of seven unique abstract paintings.

Each canvas correlates with a movement of the concerto, both of which were created concurrently in response to colour, with each colour spelling out the word Palette: Plum, Amber, Lava, Ebony, Teal, Tangerine and Emerald. Both the art and music created for PALETTE explore a relationship with visual colour, fully explored and realised in terms of texture, gesture and form.

Clyne’s artworks from PALETTE will be exhibited for the first time at Juilliard Station, next door to the concert hall on Broadway, during public hours from 14 August to 14 October. This coincides with the New York premiere of PALETTE at Alice Tully Hall on 18 September, with the Juilliard Orchestraopening the Second Annual Fall Festival at Juilliard School. The audience will be fully immersed in the colour- and sound-world of the music, with custom lighting design and projections of the paintings for each movement of the work. Ahead of the performance, Clyne will speak about the piece and her artistry at 6pm in the Station.

Conductor Stephanie Childress makes her New York debut conducting the programme, which features the Augmented Orchestra (AO), a new technology developed by Clyne and her husband, Grammy-winning audio engineer Jody Elff. AO expands the sound world of the orchestra beyond its acoustic boundaries, allowing for musical ideas in the work to be fully explored through multiple modalities, including tone, amplitude, dynamics, location and environment. In PALETTE, AO expands the sound of the orchestra to reflect the gesture and shape in Clyne’s paintings heightening each layer of musical texture and colour.

New portrait album: Abstractions featuring the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra cond. Marin Alsop (Release date: 26 September) 

Clyne’s exploration of visual art through music is celebrated in Abstractions, a new album released on the Naxos label on 26 September. The album comprises of four orchestral works by Anna performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop, featuring world premiere recordings of the title work and Color Field.

The title work, Abstractions, is a suite of five movements inspired by contemporary artworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art. The movements - ‘Marble Moon’, ‘Augeries’, ‘Seascape’, ‘River’ and ‘Three’ - are each inspired by artists Sara VanDerBeek, Julie Mehretu, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden, respectively. The work will be performed live by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestraand conducted by Cristian Măcelaru on 3 & 4 October, where the conductor will make his debut with the orchestra.

In composing Color Field, Clyne was inspired by Mark Rothko’s series of Color Field paintings, particularly his 1961 Orange, Red, Yellow. Clyne explored the phenomenon of synesthesia while she was composing; as pitch centers for her three movements she chose the ones that had been associated by Scriabin – famously interested in the same phenomenon – with the colors of the movement titles: ‘Yellow’, ‘Red’ and ‘Orange’. Color Field was premiered by Alsop and the BSO in 2021, when the present recording was made.

Other works on the album include the moving and deeply personal work Within Her Arms, in addition to Restless Oceans, a work inspired by Audre Lorde’s poem A Woman Speaks. Composed for an all-women orchestra and Alsop, the work is characterized by a rhythmic power and driven by body percussion and foot stomps, creating a ‘defiant piece that embraces the power of women’. The work was premiered by Alsop and an-women orchestra at the World Economic Forum in 2018 and will receive its Irish premiere in Dublin on 16 October, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra Ireland.

The fruitful collaboration between composer Anna Clyne and conductor Marin Alsop dates from the 2010 Cabrillo Festival, when Alsop conducted Clyne’s Rewind. A few years later, Clyne served as Composer-in-Residence with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for the 2015–16 season, toward the end of Alsop’s transformative 14-year tenure as Music Director. Calling Clyne a “singularly talented composer,” Alsop finds her music “deeply expressive and captivating”. 

Continuing tour of Orbits, including Scottish premiere (27 September, Edinburgh)

Clyne’s latest work for choir, Orbits, has been presented this year as part of The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage; a twenty-date tour across cathedrals, churches and abbeys across the UK. Orbits, ‘a lively, melodious and innovative work’ (Bachtrack), is a setting of the poem I Live My Life in Growing Orbits by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in a translation by the American poet Robert Bly.

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

The tour continues with performances in London, Wells, Tewkesbury, Hereford, Truro, Exeter, Southwell and Hexham until 4 October concluding with a performance at Chichester Cathedral. The Scottish premiere of the work to take place on 27 September in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh.

Glasslands premieres in London (17 October), Sweden (6 November) and Germany (7 December)

Anna Clyne, Jess Gillam and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Sarah Smarch.

Saxophonist Jess Gillam continues to tour the critically acclaimed Glasslands – a work inspired by an imaginary world of three realms governed by the banshee. In Irish folklore, the banshee is a female spirit, who heralds the death of a family member, usually by wailing, screaming, or keening in the silence of the night.

Having premiered the work in February 2023 with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Gillam has swiftly made Glasslands a signature piece, even adding her own cadenza to the work, which premiered in New York at Lincoln Centre in July 2025.

Gillam gives the London premiere of Glasslands at Barbican Hall under the baton of Nil Vendittialongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 17 October; the Swedish premiere with the Norrlands Opera Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eduardo Straussers on 6 November and the German premiere with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin led by Dalia Stasevska on 7 December. Gillam will also give performances of the work in Belfast and Liverpool with conductor Jonathan Bloxham and the Ulster Orchestra and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra respectively in early 2026.

Time and Tides Australian premiere (18 October)

Clyne’s musicality through poetry also extends to the folk songs that inspired Time and Tides, a four movement violin concerto written for and dedicated to Pekka Kuusisto. This collection of folk songs explores themes of boating, the oceans and parting from loved ones. Each movement begins with a statement of the folk tune in its original form, with Clyne then harmonizing, orchestrating and expanding upon the source material to create new narratives. The fifth and final movement, titled Farewell, weaves together elements of all four folk tunes heard in the previous movements.

Kuusisto leads the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in the Australian premiere of Time and Tides on 18 October.