Holst: St Paul's Suite, Op. 29 No. 2

A collection of prized Decca recordings of the music of Holst, including a rare – and controversial! – recording by film score supremo Bernard Herrmann, released internationally for the first time on CD. Also included are two orchestral works (The Perfect Fool and Egdon Heath) conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, recorded in 1961 and much praised at his first appearance and its subsequence recurrences on CD. Much of Holst’s life was spent teaching and the St. Paul’s Suite was written for his pupils to play in their school orchestra. The finale – where Holst cleverly counterpoints ‘The Dargason’ with ‘Greensleeves’ is an arrangement of the parallel movement in his Second Suite for military band, composed two years earlier. The legendary recording by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble of the two Suites, made in 1955, here reappears, and is complemented with another suite for brass band, the Moorside Suite, commissioned by the BBC and the National Brass Band Festival Committee.

Recording producers: Tony D’Amato, Gavin Barratt (The Planets); Ray Minshull (Egdon Heath, The Perfect Fool); Paul Myers (St. Paul’s Suite, Fugal Concerto); James Mallinson (Moorside Suite); Wilma Cozart Fine (Suites Nos. 1 & 2)

Recording engineers: Arthur Lilley (The Planets); Kenneth Wilkinson (The Perfect Fool); Jonathan Stokes (St. Paul’s Suite, Fugal Concerto); Michael Mailes (Moorside Suite); C. Robert Fine (Suites)

Recording locations: Eastman Theater, Rochester, New York, United States, May 1955 (Suites Nos. 1 & 2); Kingsway Hall, London, UK, March 1961 (Egdon Heath, The Perfect Fool), February 1970 (The Planets); Town Hall, Huddersfield, United Kingdom, June 1976 (Moorside Suite); Ordway Music Theater, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, May 1992 (St. Paul’s Suite, Fugal Concerto)

The Planets, one of the most popular and colourful orchestral scores of the twentieth century, here rubs shoulders with works showing Holst’s interest in English folksong; the mysticism of India; and his austerely beautiful take on Thomas Hardy’s “The Return of the Native” in Egdon Heath.

Holst was born in Cheltenham in England in 1874 into a family with a long musical tradition. He began composing whilst still at school and then at Oxford. He was sent to London to study with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, and it was here that he met and became a lifelong friend of Vaughan Williams. In 1905 he was appointed Director of Music at St. Paul's School in Hammersmith, London, a post he held until his death in 1934. Holst's most popular work and the piece that has kept him in the public eye since it was first performed in 1916 is The Planets, and the recording presented here is conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, the man who gave the work it's first performance. Great though The Planets is, it only shows one side of Holst's musical personality and the strength of this set is that it provides the opportunity to explore the other sides of this great master's musical personality.

Sir Edward Elgar once described the sensation of flying in an aeroplane to Frederick Delius: “There is a delightful feeling of elation in sailing through gold and silver clouds. It is, Delius, rather like your music – a little intangible sometimes, but always very beautiful.”