Holst: A Fugal Concerto, H152 Op. 40 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)

Renowned above all for the colour and splendour of The Planets, Holst created a uniquely idiosyncratic and outward-looking body of work, informed by his personal enthusiasms; for education, native folksong, the European avant-garde and Indian mysticism. This collection surveys all the musical genres in which he made his mark, from brass band to opera, in performances by some of his most noted champions.

Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham on 21st September 1874. He learnt the piano from early age but, suffering from asthma and short sight, he found it hard. At the age of seven his mother died. He began to compose at Cheltenham Grammar School with Berlioz’s treatise on instrumentation as his guide and at seventeen he was conducting local village choirs. The neuritis in his right arm had convinced his father that he would never become a solo pianist so he was allowed a few months in Oxford to learn counterpoint before moving to London to study composition with Stanford.

He entered the Royal College of Music in 1893 but did not win a scholarship until two years later – Stanford found him hardworking rather than brilliant. His compositions tended to be saturated with imitations of Wagner. In 1895 he met Vaughan Williams and for the rest of his life they would play sketches of their latest compositions to each other.

He was invited to conduct the Hammersmith Socialist Choir in William Morris’s house where he met his future wife. He became fascinated by Hindu literature and philosophy to such an extent that he decided to learn Sanskrit – his Rig Veda settings are testament to this interest. He had also studied the trombone at college and it was this which brought him employment, with the Carl Rosa Opera and the Scottish Orchestra, if detracting him from his wish to compose.

Luckily he was appointed a teacher first in Dulwich and then at St. Paul’s in Hammersmith where he would be director of music, a position he held for the rest of his life. With security of income he was able to devote himself more to composition and a string of works by which he is best known, chief of which is The Planets, appeared. Their success made publishers want to revisit his earlier works and he found the extra work of correcting proofs time-consuming. His later works were more intense and the public found them harder to understand and it is only now, with a greater chance to listen to them, that we can fathom their genius.

His final years were blighted by illnesses which started after falling from the rostrum and hitting his head, he suffered from headaches and sleeplessness. In 1927 Cheltenham gave him his own festival and in 1930 he accepted the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society. In 1932 he went to Harvard University to lecture but a severe attack of haemorrhagic gastritis caused him to return home and spent the next eighteen months in and out of clinics and, although In frequent pain, he kept on composing. In May 1934 he had an operation in London died on the 25th.