Edmund Finnis Song Cycle 'Out of the Dawn's Mind' Debuts with Ruby Hughes

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Composer Finnis and Manchester Collective mark their PENTATONE debut with a meditation on natural rhythms and the flux of existence.

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Manchester Collective and composer Edmund Finnis present Out of the Dawn's Mind, a song cycle setting five poems from Alice Oswald's acclaimed collection with soprano Ruby Hughes. The recording is set for digital release on 6 November 2026 via PENTATONE.

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Edmund Finnis' Out of the Dawn's Mind is an intensely atmospheric song cycle for soprano and string orchestra, setting five poems from Alice Oswald's acclaimed collection Falling Awake. Performed by soprano Ruby Hughes and Manchester Collective, it inhabits the fragile space between sound and silence, light and darkness, presence and disappearance.

Tracing a world in constant motion, Finnis' finely detailed music responds to Oswald's poetry with extraordinary sensitivity to the rhythms and textures of the natural world, creating a work that is both intimate and expansive – a meditation on the flux of life and the instability of everything within it.

Following the Edison Award-winning 2023 EP Youth, featuring Finnis' piano works performed by Clare Hammond, Out of the Dawn's Mind offers a new portrait of one of Britain's most distinctive contemporary composers. His music is here evocatively interpreted by Manchester Collective (who commissioned this work) and Ruby Hughes, marking their PENTATONE debut.

'I have felt a strong affinity with Alice Oswald's intensely beautiful poetry since first encountering it over a decade ago. She is acutely aware of the world around us, and is able to articulate something unique about the experience of living within it.

Oswald has said that she thinks of her poems as 'sound carvings', or as melting ice shapes that vanish and are only there for a moment. Maybe this is why I hear the possibility of music in my mind when I read these poems.

Out of the Dawn's Mind is a song cycle for soprano and string orchestra that sets five poems from Alice Oswald's book Falling Awake. These poems deal with light, water, time and the experience of coming into contact with the world.

The cycle opens with a dawn. Light searches a room 'where two lay twined in bed'. There is falling rain 'that rises to the light and falls again'. At dusk a shadow falls. Rooks fly upwards. The cycle closes in the snow with a kind of erasure.

This is a cycle about cycles, and the flux of the world; about rising and falling; about the sensation of life.' – Edmund Finnis

OUT OF THE DAWN'S MIND — Music by Edmund Finnis, Poems by Alice Oswald

1. A Rushed Account of the Dew

2. Sunday Ballad

3. A Short Story of Falling

4. Shadow

5. Slowed-Down Blackbird

Manchester Collective, Rakhi Singh, director; Ruby Hughes, soprano

Edmund Finnis is a 'hugely gifted composer' (The Telegraph) whose music has been hailed as 'magical' (The Times), 'iridescent, compelling' (The Guardian), 'exquisite' (Sara Mohr-Pietsch, BBC Radio 3) and 'ethereally beautiful' (Herald Scotland). His works are regularly performed and broadcast, both at home in the UK and internationally.

Former BBC New Generation Artist and winner of both First Prize and Audience Prize at London's 2009 Handel Singing Competition, Ruby Hughes also holds a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award and was shortlisted for a 2014 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award. She has become known for her interpretations of the music of the baroque and 20th and 21st century.

Hailed as 'the UK's most innovative classical ensemble' (The Telegraph), Manchester Collective commission and collaborate with boundary-pushing artists across music and beyond. The Collective's vision is to reshape the future of classical music by creating radical artistic work from their base in the north of England.

Out of the Dawn's Mind was both commissioned and recorded by Manchester Collective.

(c) Brendan Williams

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwtv/article/Photos-OUT-OF-THE-DAWNS-MIND-Edmund-Finnis-Song-Cycle-Debuts-20260924)._