O Holy of Holies represents a sidestep into a highly expressionistic soundworld, with echoes from the preceding Advent antiphons of the refrain ‘Come, Lord Jesu’. All the familiar elements of Pitts’s cross-relational and added-note harmony are present within a slow-moving harmonic framework, but the dissonance treatment in this short antiphon is particularly uncompromising – a feature which continues right up to the unresolved final chord. The effect of the piece, in keeping with the text, is of something which awaits a conclusion.
from notes by Jeremy Summerly © 2005
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