Edmund Finnis: The Human Condition Crystallised into 34 Bars of Perfect Music
After an intellectual exchange earlier in Manchester this year, Edmund Finnis returned for The Riff Questionnaire.
 | By Lucy Cheung 29 September 2026 |
On 25 October, English composer Edmund Finnis’s Cello Concerto, co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), will receive its London premiere, with cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason as soloist and Antonio Pappano conducting the LSO. In November, another new work, Out of the Dawn’s Mind, will be released as a single.
An intensely atmospheric song cycle for soprano and string orchestra, Out of the Dawn’s Mind sets five poems from British poet Alice Oswald’s acclaimed collection Falling Awake. Performed by soprano Ruby Hughes and Manchester Collective, the work inhabits the fragile space between sound and silence, light and darkness, presence and disappearance. It traces a world in constant motion, responding to Oswald’s poetry with a finely detailed sensitivity to the rhythms and textures of the natural world. The cycle opens with dawn and moves through light, water and time, closing in the snow with a kind of erasure. As Finnis puts it, “This is a cycle about cycles, and the flux of the world.”
Born in Oxford in 1984, Finnis is one of the distinctive voices in contemporary British composition. He studied with Julian Anderson and has taught at the Royal Academy of Music since 2015. His music has been performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, among others, and he has collaborated with musicians including Víkingur Ólafsson and Sheku Kanneh-Mason. In 2019, his debut album, The Air, Turning, won the Premiere Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards.
Earlier this year, we met Finnis at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, where the UK premiere of The Landscape Wakes, the final part of his orchestral trilogy commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic, had just taken place. In that conversation, he spoke about how he draws on performers’ bodies, breathing and individual musical personalities in his compositional process, his thoughts on the often-dismissed quality of sentimentality in music, and why he wants his music to engage both the mind and the heart.
As his Cello Concerto approaches its London premiere, we invited Finnis to answer a series of light-hearted questions for The Riff Questionnaire. His responses came to us from a train journey this autumn.
What is the first sound you remember being deeply moved by?
The sound of the two oboes crushing against one another at the very opening of Bach’s St John Passion. I was very fortunate to sing this piece as a boy, and the sound and intensity of the music had a profound effect on me.
Is there a piece you wish you had written yourself?
‘Hear My Prayer, O Lord’ by Henry Purcell. It feels like the human condition crystallised into 34 bars of perfect music.
What is one piece of music you return to when you don’t want to think too much?
In a Landscape by John Cage.
What does the human body give music that technology cannot?
Life! It gives music soul through the infinite nuances of touch, breath and physical expression. It brings about interpersonal communication between real, actual intelligent beings, connecting people’s minds (with their memories, longings, joys and sorrows).
What is your favourite time of day?
The dawn, because of the sense of possibility and renewal it brings.
What is the one thing you always have with you when you travel?
I find travel often opens up new head-spaces so I always have a pencil and notebook to put down the ideas that different places can inspire.
Where do you go when you need to clear your head?
There are beautiful woods quite near my home and I go there often for the sense of clarity it brings.
What quality do you most value in other people?
Recognition of the inherent dignity of every person.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Family gatherings with coffee and panettone after Mass on Christmas morning.
What is your greatest extravagance?
Old editions of books, and vinyl records.
What is your favourite meal?
The best meal I ever had was of incredibly fresh seafood near Porto. Halfway through dinner the glass-panelled walls of the restaurant dramatically opened up to the sea just outside, letting in the beautiful salty sea evening breeze.
What is something you are surprisingly bad at?
Maths! The music/maths overlap in the brain that people talk about doesn’t seem to be so much the case with me.
What is the last thing that made you laugh?
My son has started doing comic impressions of people’s voices, which cracks me up.
One thing that you wish other people would notice more
The deep value of music education in young people’s lives.
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