Two Eardley Pictures: II. Snow (2016)

The program’s opener was an atmospheric new work by Scottish composer Helen Grime (“Snow,” from “Two Eardley Pictures”); in Dausgaard’s brief spoken remarks, he noted that “the ink is hardly dry on the page.” This “Snow,” heard here in its American premiere, presents broad, expansive lines for the bass instruments, with sudden upward “snow flurries” of arpeggios for more treble instruments. There is little of the painting’s stillness in the busy, well-crafted score, which sounds both mysterious and ominous.

…[Snow] is haunting as it winds down towards its dusky close.

[Grime] has as precise an ear as any contemporary composer I can think of, and the two scores’ play of texture offered the combined pleasures of a crowded canvas and a rare vertical translucency.... Snow proved appropriately swirling, an intricate scherzo devolving into folk-song melody and melancholy but without losing sight of the agitation and dazzle.

[The performance] opened with the premiere of Snow,, the second of Helen Grime’s Two Eardley Pictures, the textures grave and cleanly etched.

...the second of a pair of works inspired by the painter Joan Eardley, and in particular her landscapes of north-east Scotland, where Grime was also brought up. [Snow] takes as its starting point The Scranky Black Farmer, a traditional song from the same region, heard at the outset on the clarinets, then shuttled from instrument to instrument in a series of variations, which in turn form the effective landscape across which scurrying figurations and slowly shifting string chords suggest the flurries and drifts of snow. It’s attractively scored, allowing the NYOS woodwind to shine and bringing out the poised clarity of the strings.