Two movements for string quartet (2001)

Holt’s Two movements for string quartet, inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem “I heard a Fly buzz when I died”, focuses in turn on two images from the poem: “ Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz”, and “The Stillness in the Room”. Holt describes Dickinson’s work as a mixture of precision and wildness, “chaos in a box”, and in the hushed atmosphere of the Pittville Pump Room, the words of the printed poem came movingly, almost painfully, alive in the final bars, “And then the Windows failed – and then I could not see to see.”
Full of subtle beauties, conveyed with perfectly blended tone by the engaging young Belcea Quartet, the score’s visionary serenity was punctuated by dangers and disturbances (the nervous energy of that intermittently buzzing fly), bringing a sting to a performance that slipped astonishingly effortlessly into the context of Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven.

Next morning, in the Pittville Pump Room, the youthful, masterful Belcea Quartet unveiled Holt’s Two movements for string quartet (2001), a Royal Philharmonic Society commission and its first (as its chairman pointed out) to be premiered outside London since Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Holt’s may not be a work of such dimensions, but its very modesty – his avowed aim of just finding “as many right notes as possible”, and the bitingly precise part-writing that has resulted – are deeply persuasive. Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buss – when I died” was his starting point, and the buzz is clearly there in the first bar, in a germinal viola solo. There is a certain Bartokian wildness to the writing, but a personal plainness, too, one that astonishingly captures – in the very last bar – that moment when Dickinson’s speaker “could not see to see”. Holt has never written better.

This exquisitely crafted work was co-commissioned by the BBC and Royal Philharmonic Society (whose past winning bets include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). Holt’s spare, pellucid score, inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson in which a fly buzzes in a still room, grows out of a gentle rocking viola figure in the second movement, though we only discover it binding powers retrospectively. Blocks of sound alternate: a ricocheting violin rises above a cello drone, sustained harmonics (without vibrato) create a wispy silence out of which clamorous agitation explodes. All ends with a brief tap of wood on string (col legno in the trade). Perfectly controlled and dazzlingly played, it showed Holt at his finest.