HOLT
…era madrugada; canciones;; sparrow night
Nash Ensemble/Lionel Friend
with Fiona Kimm (mezzo) & Gareth Hulse (oboe)
NMC D008 [61
mins]
Crotchet
This is darker music than that of Simon Holt's teacher Anthony Gilbert
(NMC D068)
which has been promoted in tandem with this one. Born 1958, Holt is an
acknowledged leader of his generation of British composers, and this portrait
CD can be recommended to those unfamiliar with his music, which is championed
regularly by London Sinfonietta, the Nash Ensembles and others.
He takes his inspirations often from literary sources, especially Spanish
ones. The first illustrates a grim Lorca poem about an unknown dead man 'with
a knife in his chest'. The three songs of Canciones too have strong Lorca
connections, the poem of the middle of the three his Cancion de Jinette.
They are given here in clear accounts, but I found Fiona Kimm's singing in
the high registers less than ingratiating.
Shadow realm is 'music to accompany a haunting' for clarinet, harp
and cello, and sparrow night a larger work for ten players with oboe
solo, and it is linked to a Chekov story about 'terrible nights with thunder,
lightning, rain and wind' - "sparrow nights". The Nash Ensemble has
lived with this music and is fully at home with its idiom.
Not much comfort or fun, but strong music in a non-doctrinaire contemporary
idiom, showing a fertile imagination and command of instrumental textures.
The usual high NMC production values, in every respect.
Peter Grahame Woolf
