- Simon Holt
Sunrise' yellow noise (1999)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Commissioned by the CBSO and Southbank Centre
Part 1 of the cycle 'a ribbon of time'.
Le Prix de la Fondation Prince Pierre, Monaco (2001)
- 3(2afl:pic).2+ca.3(3Ebcl,bcl)+cbcl.1+cbn/1221/3perc/hp/str(16.12.0.0.8)
- soprano
- 12 min
- Emily Dickinson
- English
Programme Note
Sunrise’ yellow noise is scored for a soprano with an orchestra minus violas and cellos. It lasts approximately 12’ . It is a setting of an Emily Dickinson poem (written in 1864):
Ample make this Bed –
Make this Bed with Awe –
In it wait till Judgement break
Excellent and Fair.
Make its Mattress straight –
Make its Pillow round –
Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground –
© Simon Holt
Ample make this Bed –
Make this Bed with Awe –
In it wait till Judgement break
Excellent and Fair.
Make its Mattress straight –
Make its Pillow round –
Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground –
© Simon Holt
Scores
Preview the score
Reviews
The Englishman Simon Holt met great approval for the German premiere of his work Sunrise’ yellow noise, commissioned by the CBSO. It is based on one of Emily Dickinson’s poems in which she deals with death, one of her great lyrical subjects. Holt confronts Dickinson’s mystic language with music of great atmospheric density, intense, measured, deeply moving. The soprano, Lisa Milne, gave a fantastic performance with a happy combination of a strong voice, clear diction and formal elegance.
19th May 2000
The orchestra has no middle strings…This highlights the low brass and woodwind…Offsetting their growling solidarity, harp, handbells, tuned gongs and vibraphone shimmer and glisten. Calm is broken by menacing drum rolls and squealing trumpets. Within this short piece, Holt has created an intense, small-scale drama.
9th April 2000
…it is more than a simple text-based work. The vocal lines are embedded in the teeming fabric of curious hollowed out colours from a band without violas and cellos…Holt’s sound world is utterly distinctive, his ideas indelible. Holt has never written with such confidence for the orchestra before.
9th April 2000
A vivid aural imagination is at the heart of Simon Holt’s music, as was evident from the poised, pregnant opening…of his new work…a contextualising of Emily Dickinson’s eight-line poem…it is perfectly true that no composer writing today does so with such minute sensitivity and clarity, as much instinct for new, cogent shapes, for dramatic changes of light and mood…Holt’s world is essentially an intimate one. He invites the listener into his world.
5th April 2000
Holt’s Sunrise’ yellow noise… made a striking impression…Though the vocal passages… are the key to the expressive whole, they are brief and, in a rather Boulezian way, parenthetical to an argument bound up with subtly investigating extremes of instrumental colour. It struck me as one of Holt’s most effective scores.
4th April 2000
Holt has that gift for atmosphere…He excels in the smaller medium of chamber ensemble and in Sunrise’ yellow noise beacons of lucid instrumentation shone through the thicker-textured moments…The moods fluctuate between fleeting rapture and sustained elegy, from the voiceless, low-pitched opening in the soprano to the plangent cor anglais that offsets Milne’s[soprano] blazing high tessitura near the end of verse one, the strange, sad cortège of woodwind that ushers in the rapt start to the second verse, and a dark, muted epilogue tinged by brass and bells.
3rd April 2000
Holt knows what he wants and gets it here in a carefully constructed piece, in which a hollow-sounding orchestra – no middle strings- supplies agitated little dances around the Emily Dickinson text from which it takes its title.
3rd April 2000