Holst: A Choral Fantasia, H177

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.

A 5CD set containing titles from the acclaimed EMI British Composers series, based around the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries; Gerald Finzi, Arnold Bax and Gustav Holst.

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.