Night Songs

Helen Grime's Debut Disc contrasts orchestral works - including her first Hallé commission,the nocturne Near Midnight (2013) - with smaller-scale pieces featuring the Hallé Soloists. The earliest work here, Virga, is a densely-packed miniature, taking its title from precipitation which evaporates before it reaches the ground; its textures are dominated by falling cascades of woodwind droplets. Night Songs was commissioned for the 2012 BBC Proms and premiered by the BBC SO and Oliver Knussen.

Other works include Into the faded air - a string sextet titled after a line from T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets - the Clarinet Concerto, featuring Hallé principal Lynsey Marsh, and Everyone Sang - inspired by Siegfried Sassoon.

Debut Discs is a 4-year series in collaboration with BA (Hons) Graphic Design students at Central Saint Martin's College of Arts and Design who have designed the cover artwork for the series.

Debut Discs has the ambassadorial support of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

The series features the composers Huw Watkins, Dai Fujikura, Sam Hayden, Richard Causton, Joseph Phibbs, Larry Goves, Ben Foskett and Charlotte Bray.

Born in 1981, Helen Grime studied oboe with John Anderson and composition with Julian Anderson and Edwin Roxburgh at the Royal College of Music. In 2003 she won a British Composer Award for her Oboe Concerto, and was awarded all the major composition prizes in the RCM. In 2008 she was awarded a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship to study at the Tanglewood Music Center. She became a lecturer in composition at the Department of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, in January 2010. She was appointed Associate Composer to the Hallé in 2011.

Helen has had works commissioned by some of the most established performers including London Symphony Orchestra, BCMG, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center. Conductors who have performed her work include Daniel Harding, Pierre Boulez and Yan Pascal Tortelier. Her work Night Songs was commissioned by the BBC Proms in 2012 and premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Oliver Knussen. Grime's Near Midnight receives its London Premiere at this year's BBC Proms (9 August) with the Hallé & Sir Mark Elder.