Simon Holt says of Shadow realm that it is ''music to accompany a haunting''. This could apply equally well to the other three pieces:... Era madrugada is a response to a Lorca poem about the discovery of a corpse in the street, Canciones could be subtitled 'songs of love and death', and Sparrow night outlines a nocturnal mood of fear and apprehension. Holt might seem to have a dangerously one-track mind, yet his music is never remotely monotonous or thinly-spread. It teems with sharply etched ideas and, although emotionally highly-strung, moves within the strongly defined outlines of well-constructed forms. There is plenty of discipline to counterbalance the wild and strange emotions.
Holt was born in 1954, and these works, all from the 1980s, confirm him as one of the most distinctive and successful composers of his generation. Any music as strongly pictorial as his runs the risk of falling into mere sound-effects, but Holt avoids the perils of facile pattern-making. He has a refined ear for the way in which intervals balance out into complex yet logical harmony, and his mastery of tone-colour and instrumental resource is clearly relished by all the performers in these admirably lively and natural recordings. In particular, Fiona Kimm brings an unexaggerated flexibility, rich in light and shade, to Canciones, and Anthony Pay copes serenely with the stratospheric clarinet writing of Shadow realm. With Gareth Hulse a brilliantly alert protagonist in Sparrow night, these are all performances of particular distinction.'