Boots of Lead (2002)

The setting carries the words, colours them and finds within them a range of expression that is both powerful and sensitive. There are ear-catching instrumental timbres… Holt has described the piece as “a stately, claustrophobically slow, frozen dirge”, but that does not take into account the music’s extraordinarily haunting impact, and the fact that there is always the feeling that Holt is composing because he has some compelling ideas inside him that he simply has to express.

“I felt a funeral, in my brain…” So begins the Emily Dickinson poem on which Boots of Lead, Simon Holt’s latest Sound Investment Scheme commission, is based. The keystone of an arch of five Dickinson settings by the composer, its relation to the overall cycle is comparable to that of the Funeral March from Webern’s Op 6 Orchestral Pieces, a movement whose orchestration shares with the new work a cerebral reverberation of bells and gongs.
The poet’s stringent but explosive language makes an ideal springboard for Holt’s style – a powerful fusion of the implacably spare with the emotionally intense. More an aural expansion of the poem than a conventional setting, Boots of Lead enhances and develops the text with some of Britten’s alchemical skill. In the world premiere, soloist Rinat Shaham was alive to the potency of both words and music, her sense of drama ignited by the virtuosity of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) soloists. Sir Simon Rattle was evidently thrilled with this score- the dark, intensely personal work he expected from Holt in Sunrise’yellow noise, a CBSO commission also to a Dickinson text, now fully realised.

The new music with the strongest character and bite, though, came from Simon Holt. We heard Boots of Lead, an Emily Dickinson setting.

Holt’s palette tends towards the dark, with shivery splotches from a cimbalom. The pulse, unusually, is often regular. But it makes sense: the Dickinson poem is I Felt a Funeral in my Brain, and a dirge is under way.

Shrewd punters in BCMG's "Sound Investment" scheme continue to be rewarded with riches. On Sunday we hear the latest success in this remarkable enterprise...
Simon Holt's "Boots of Lead", the third instalment of an on-going fascination with the poetry of Emily Dickinson, proved a spellbinding exploration of the numbness of death - tension never sagging during its 14-minute setting of "I felt a funeral in my brain", even through a brave interlude of near-stasis towards the end.

In many of Simon Holt's early works, the poetry of Lorca was the driving force. That involvement climaxed four years ago in his first opera, based on a Lorca play. In his more recent pieces Holt has revealed a new poetic passion: the work of Emily Dickinson. He began a five-part Dickinson cycle - "a ribbon of time", as he calls it - with a work for soprano and orchestra composed for Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra two years ago. On Sunday, Rattle and the orchestra's sibling ensemble, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, introduced the third part of the sequence.
In Boots of Lead, Holt sets Dickinson's "I felt a funeral, in my brain" for a mezzo-soprano and a typically pungent collection of instruments in which an off-stage clarinet plays a leading role. The composer calls it a "stately, claustrophobically slow, frozen dirge", which makes the music sound far less interesting and eventful than it really is. Holt releases the passion behind Dickinson's laconic words in a Birtwistle-style processional that pushes instruments to extreme registers at the climax and uses a cimbalom to add a baleful edge. The music seems to teeter on the edge of extinction at one point, before the clarinet revives it and allows the singer to deliver the last verse, and with it a crumb of comfort. It is all perfectly paced and vividly imagined.