Unrise - Score Only by Anthony Gilbert Large Ensemble - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1696260

...teruato...

...v’shavah...

...lo va-ah...



Avraham ben Yitzhak (1883-1950) has been called the first modern Hebrew poet. He left Vienna for Israel on Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938. Among his papers when he died was found a poetic fragment in Hebrew which could be paraphrased as:



Whose was the dawn the cock proclaimed,

his screeching trumpet-calls echoing in the darkness?

Hands were raised feebly to shield eyes from the brilliance

but no sun rose; for both mouth and hands had lied.



The three movements of Unrise reflect upon these lines: 1: ‘trumpetings’, wild chants and chorales, leading into 2: ‘echoings’, transformations of the first material into what could be a crazy march and a dance of terror, and 3: the ‘not-rising’ - further transformations into a mechanical dawn-chorus. The word the poet uses for ‘cock’ also means a strutting male. Most of the musical material is derived from a melody and two symmetrical scales taught me in 1938-9 by a young Viennese refugee who made her home with us in London.

This sixteen-minute work is intended as a belated sixtieth-birthday present for conductor Timothy Reynish - born March 1938 - in gratitude for over a quarter of a century of support, encouragement and fine performances. It was first performed at the Spitalfields Festival, London, by the RNCM Wind Orchestra directed by Timothy Reynish in 2001.