For the
wider musical public Imogen Holst is known, if at all,
as the daughter of Gustav Holst. She was the stern sentinel
of her father’s musical heritage. She will also perhaps
be recognised as the conductor of her father’s more ‘neo-classical’ works
on two Lyrita LPs of the late 1960s. These have been reissued
on CD (
Lyrita
SRCD 223 and
SRCD
336).
In fact she was also a composer of some distinction who,
so far as the conventions of her day would have it, laboured
under two clouds: that she was a woman and that she was
the child of a great composer. This disc opens the door
into her musical legacy.
The style
span here encompassed by her music is wide. Imogen Holst's
journey was from poetic-ecstatic pastoral to a taut and
succinct economy of expression. The lyric impulse remains
a constant. This gift for the singing line is at its most
candid in the
Phantasy Quartet of 1928. This Cobbett
prize piece will gladden the heart of lovers of early Howells
chamber music. It captures the shivering seductive green
murmur of the English early summer yet expressed in an
almost Gallic ecstasy. You must hear this if you enjoy
the Howells Piano Quartet.
The compact
1982
String Quintet was written 54 years later.
The string textures are just as carefully calculated but
the language is more reserved. Intriguing to hear the careful
English countryside skip in the step for the
Scherzo.
This is so redolent of Britten's
Simple Symphony and
Bridge's
Sir Roger de Coverley. The denser emotions
of the final
Theme and Variations are piercing and
its emotional world has a philosophical reserve about it.
In 1968
she wrote a compact little
Duo for viola and piano.
This is energetic and Hindemithian - clear as spring-water
yet shot through with a moonlit Schoenbergian dissonance
and grotesquerie.
In 1944
she wrote her
First String Trio for the Dartington
Trio. It is a work in four movements – alive with stony,
spiky and searing dissonance borne down with foreboding.
There are moments here when one thinks of the Viennese-style
works of Frank Bridge such as the Piano Trio no.2
and the last two string quartets. A more chiming Englishry
can be heard in the
andante finale although this
soon coagulates and becomes acerbic and probing.
The
Fall of the Leaf is
for solo cello and is based on a tune from the Fitzwilliam
Virginal book. The dedicatee was Pamela Hind O'Malley.
Steven Isslerlis speaks of the work's ‘quiet poetry'
and this catches its severe yet singing essence rather
well. It is in five miniature movements.
Two years
after the Phantasy Quartet came the three movement
Sonata
for Violin and Cello. It is as if Imogen Holst has
put direct-speaking English pastoralism back into the toy
box. This work moves into Bartók territory and is memorable
for marked rhythmic attack and for the lichen-hung reflective-meditative
Adagio.
It was written in Vienna.
The well-rehearsed
notes are by Christopher Tinker. The playing is done with
much feeling and is always articulate. You will however
have to make allowances for the deep intakes of breath
from the players - it speaks of their emotional engagement
but some will find it irritating.
I hope
that there will be more Imogen Holst recordings. This cross-section
of her chamber works is evidence of her Continental credentials
cross-affecting her early predilection for rural idylls.
Rob Barnett