Gustav Theodore Holst

The first disc of what was projected to be a cycle, cut tragically short by the recent death of Richard Hickox, one of the foremost exponents of British music.

The Planets is at the heart of the English repertoire, yet much of Holst’s orchestral output is unjustly neglected. This series will demonstrate that Holst was a composer of great inventiveness. Volume 1 offers three rarely recorded works, the ballets The Lure (its first time to CD), The Golden Goose and The Morning of the Year, alongside the more familiar Ballet from the one-act opera The Perfect Fool, long recognised as one of Holst’s most successful small-scale works.

The Golden Goose and The Morning of the Year are known as ‘choral ballets’. The Golden Goose was composed for Morley College, where Holst had been Director of Music since 1907, and was intended for amateurs. The ballet is based on the Grimms’ fairy tale of the Princess who had never been able to laugh. The Morning of the Year was the first work to be commissioned by the BBC Music Department, and so is an altogether more serious affair and dedicated to the English Folk Dance Society. This is one of Holst’s most impressive fusions of folk music with his own style, and has no need of the stage to make its full impact.

The Lure shares some of the same origins with the Perfect Fool ballet. The music was written in 1918 as incidental music for a play called The Sneezing Charm by Clifford Bax but at the time it was performed neither as a ballet nor as an orchestral piece. Frustrated by the lack of performance, Holst eventually withdrew the work from his list of compositions. Based on a Northumbrian folk tune, it is lively and powerful, and typical of the composer.

Holst had no desire to be predictable and if he has sometimes seemed to be eclipsed by his more gifted contemporaries he remains one of the most original and innovative musicians of the past century. This recorded survey is sure to shine new light on his neglected works and introduce a new audience to his orchestral music.

At no time in its long history did European music go through a period of such revolution and diversification as in the 20th Century.

Wagner had transformed music in the 19th century to the extent that every composer coming after had to acknowledge his existence, to a lesser or greater extent.

The advent of the new century saw a great flourishing of compositional styles and techniques that were largely the direct result of Wagner's influence.

Not only that, the new century was to be one of great technological advance and invention. The gramophone and, later, the spread of radio, brought about massive changes in the way that ordinary people accessed and perceived music. Suddenly a whole new world of serious music was to open up to an audience that had hitherto been excluded from what had previously been, albeit unintentionally, an elitist art form.

The works in this set of 16 CDs have been arranged in strict chronological order of composition and the first disc begins with a work from 1901 that has become one of the most popular works in the classical repertoire, mainly through it's use in another great 20th-century art form – the film: Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto.

Thereafter each disc in the set takes the listener on a fascinating journey through the century, composer by composer and work by work, from Russian Romanticism, French Impressionism, English Pastoralism, Atonalism, Neo Classicism right up to Post Modernism, and from as wide a range of countries and genres as possible.

When Gustav Holst composed his celebrated suite 'The Planets' during the First World War, the solar system was bounded by the orbit of Neptune ('The Mystic' in Holst's astrological subtitle)—which Holst naturally placed at the end of his masterpiece. It was not until fifteen years later that American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, trying to find the reason for peculiarities in Neptune's orbit, realised that there was another planet further out whose gravitational pull was influencing it. And so was discovered the dark, remote and mysterious world of Pluto, named after the king of the Underworld. The discovery was made but three years before Holst's death, but he never expressed any intention of adding it to his by-then famous work. Sixty years later, invited to do so by The Hallé Orchestra, the challenge was taken up by Colin Matthews whose 'Pluto—The Renewer' emerges eerily from the disappearing final bars of 'Neptune'. This was the first recording of Holst's 'Planets' with the additional planet, sumptuously recorded by Tony Faulkner in Manchester's Bridgewater Hall.

The CD also includes Holst's late Lyric Movement for viola and chamber orchestra, written in 1933, the year before the composer died.

Originally issued on CDA67270