Holst: Suite No. 1 for Military Band in E flat major, Op. 28 No. 1, H105

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)

Music for Concert Band, played by one of the finest military bands, the Central Band of the RAF. All of the music featured here was originally composed for wind band including the ever-popular Holst Suites, Vaughan Williams’ English Folk Suite and an array of works by Percy Grainger.

This 2-CD compilation contains 147 minutes of music by leading American orchestras and conductors including the Cleveland Orchestra with Lorin Maazel, the Boston Baroque with Martin Pearlman, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Slatkin, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with Robert Shaw & Andrew Litton and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Robert Spano & David Zinman. They perform works by Copland, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Berlioz, Shostakovich, Enescu and Handel.

The Eastman Wind Ensemble, conducted by Frederick Fennell, perform classics of the British concert band repertoire including the Holst Suites, the Vaughan Williams Folk Song Suite and Toccata Marziale, Gordon Jacob’s William Byrd Suite, Walton’s Crown Imperial and Holst’s Hammersmith Prelude and Scherzo.

With this addition to Naxos’s popular Wind Band Classics series the Ensemble explores the music of four musical trendsetters — Hindemith, whose exhilarating Symphony convinced other leading composers that the wind band is a legitimate medium for serious music; Holst, whose First Suite is regarded as a cornerstone of the band repertoire; Schwantner, whose …and the mountains rising nowhere calls for amplified contrabass, piano and 46 percussion instruments; and Grainger, whose Lincolnshire Posy is considered a pinnacle among his folk-music settings.

Recorded in the Domkirke in the historic Viking city of Toensberg.