Holst: The Planets, Op. 32

Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (b.1931) is the last living survivor of a great Russian quartet of conductors consisting of Mravinsky, Kondrashin and Svetlanov.

He was the highly distinguished principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1978 to 1981, an exciting period in the orchestra’s history faithfully captured here.

During this period, he conducted many British composers, a favourite being Britten (the Russian premiere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Vaughan Williams (a complete cycle on Melodiya), Walton, Elgar, Maxwell Davies (the premiere of Symphony No.2) and John Tavener.

These recordings of Holst’s Planets and Britten’s Variations & Fugue on a Theme of Purcell have never been issued before on CD.

The Planets is new to Rozhdestvensky’s extensive discography. Rozhdestvensky’s 1980 Royal Festival Hall performance is a freshly conceived interpretation of The Planets which is both exciting and superbly played, and the stereo recording has a spectacular dynamic range.

The performance of Britten’s Variations & Fugue on a Theme of Purcell was given on a Far East tour in Osaka, Japan in 1981. Osaka’s Royal Festival Hall has a wonderful natural acoustic which invests each instrument with great clarity and warmth.

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)

That The Planets occupies a place at the heart of the English musical repertoire is indisputable, yet much of Holst’s orchestral output is unjustly neglected. Chandos’ series demonstrates that Holst was a composer whose inventiveness and originality was not limited to one work. The series was originally to be conducted by Richard Hickox who sadly passed away in 2009 after completing Volume 1, released to great critical acclaim. Gramophone stated that ‘Richard Hickox’s final project, reviving little-known Holst works, is a triumph’. In this second volume, exclusive Chandos artist Sir Andrew Davis has taken the baton, conducting the BBC Philharmonic in a unique programme: The Planets, Holst’s orchestral tour de force, as well as two comparative rarities in the concert hall, the Japanese Suite and Beni Mora.

Holst wrote all three works between 1909 and 1916, years which span the most important developments in his composing life as he moved away from the Wagner-influenced works of his youth. He had already begun to absorb English folk music, largely through the influences of his close friend Vaughan Williams, and that, together with his study of Sanskrit literature, led him to experiment with new and unique fusions in his music.

The Japanese Suite was originally intended for dancing, and composed at the request of a Japanese dancer, Michio Ito, who supplied Holst with most of the themes in a somewhat unorthodox manner – by whistling them to him. Although the music may seem as characteristic of Holst himself as of anything readily identifiable as Japanese, this work clearly demonstrates a refreshing openness to new influences, which few of his contemporaries shared.

Beni Mora is inspired by ethnic music that Holst heard on a trip to Algeria. Its orientalism may seem very westernised to those familiar with the original music, but it reflects his own experiences of the place – ‘a mix of East and West where one moment he saw an Arab woman leaving a mosque and another moment he saw an advertisement for American Cinematography’. The work was premiered in London in 1912, to the distaste of one critic who exclaimed, ‘We didn’t ask for Biskra girls’. Vaughan Williams later wrote that if the piece had been played in Paris instead of London, Holst would have gained fame a good ten years before The Planets made him a household name. One of the more remarkable musical points about the piece is found in the third movement, which is based on a motif played by a bamboo flutist whom Holst heard on the streets in Algeria. The flutist played the same four notes for hours. This experience is vividly recalled in the movement, yet the mastery of Holst's harmonic texture prevents the motif from becoming tiresome. Beni Mora is regarded as Holst’s first mature orchestral piece.

The immense popularity of The Planets, and the familiarity of the music, means that its originality is often overlooked. But while it is possible to point to a number of contemporary works which clearly had an influence on Holst (Debussy’s Nocturnes, Stravinsky’s The Firebird etc.), the sheer inventiveness and diversity of the music are entirely his own, as he takes us on an unforgettable journey from the violence of ‘Mars’, through the serene calm of ‘Venus’ and the remote and otherworldly ‘Neptune’.

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.