Lyrita have always
had a strong Holst niche with those
splendid Boult/LPO and Imogen Holst/ECO
recordings for long a mainstay of their
vinyl catalogue. They also found almost
immediate places as of right in the
reissue catalogue sparingly issued by
Lyrita in the early 1990s.
Whitman’s free-ranging
and very unVictorian emotional poetry
was a great draw among composers. Both
Holst and his friend RVW came under
its influence. For Vaughan Williams
there were to be songs and most importantly
the 1909 Sea Symphony. W H Bell
- surely the next major discovery -
wrote a Whitman Symphony in the
same year as the Holst overture. Holst
of course set Whitman’s words in the
most moving and masterly Ode to Death
(1919) written in the milieu of
a grieving nation. Both Holst and Harty
set Whitman’s Mystic Trumpeter.
Holst also wrote a Whitman Elegy
which you can hear on SRCD.209.
Holst’s Whitman overture op.
7 is a confident though not very personal
essay bustling with the sort of irrepressibly
Straussian power to be found in Szymanowski’s
Concert Overture but
more often immersed in the manners of
Dvořák and Schumann. Similarly
in search of its own personality is
the contemporaneous but undemanding
Suite de Ballet which
draws raucously on the pier end and
the music-hall in the first movement.
Then comes a delicately lilting Valse
with some shivers of drama. The
Scène de Nuit suggests
some Granada nocturne with a sentiment-sweet
violin solo – deliciously done. The
final Carnival has a military
air – something of the confidently bustling
march about this.
The remaining three
suites are all as orchestrated by Gordon
Jacob in the 1940s and 1950s – most
skilfully too. Their recordings were
made with support from the Holst Foundation.
The Suite in E flat is the first truly
distinctive piece on the disc. It will
be instantly recognised by many because
it is an orchestration of the Suite
No. 1 for military band in which form
a famous recording was made by the Eastman
Wind Ensemble conducted by Frederick
Fennell. It is here played with gusto
although I am not at all sure it suits
the orchestra as well as it suits a
concert band. If you think of the First
Suite as the first set of Malcolm Arnold’s
English Dances then the Second
Suite - dubbed here A Hampshire Suite
- is like Arnold’s second set. It is
a credit to Holst that it does not feel
‘warmed over’. Here the music fits the
orchestral glove Jacob made for it with
greater conviction and the strings,
harp and wind solos suit the tenderly
intoned Song of the Blacksmith even
more successfully than in the Second
Suite’s original instrumentation, again
for military band. This time there are
four movements against the E flat suite’s
three. The finale is the Fantasia
on the Dargason and will be even
better known in its arrangement for
strings as the finale of the St Paul’s
Suite. There is a recording of the
Hampshire Suite on ClassicO
conducted by Douglas Bostock. While
the first two suites were for military
band (another denizen of the seaside
and pier-end) the Moorside Suite
was written as test piece for the
National Brass Band Festival in 1928.
The Nocturne for full orchestra
– also to be heard in the string orchestra
version on SRCD.223 - is desolate in
a way not that distant from Sibelius’s
Fourth Symphony. This reaches across
to the desolation of Holst’s Egdon
Heath. Braithwaite lends the piece
the chilliest temperature I have ever
heard. This provides an easily relished
contrast when the March crashes
in with its plough-boy confidence and
swagger. The acoustic image for the
Watford Town Hall items is broad and
deep, accommodating the grandeur of
the March with as much ease as the thud
of the bass drum.
If you would like to
explore Holst further then do seek out
the following Lyritas:-
SRCD.209
A Winter Idyll, Elegy,
Indra, A Song of the Night,
Invocation, Sita – Interlude,
The Lure, Dances from
The Morning of the Year ()
SRCD.222
Fugal Overture, Somerset Rhapsody,
Beni Mora, Hammersmith,
Scherzo, Japanese Suite (Boult)
SRCD.223
Ballet Music from The Golden Goose,
Songs Without Words, Fugal
Concerto, Nocturne, Double
Concerto, Lyric Movement,
Brook Green, Capriccio.
(ECO/Imogen Holst)
The ClassicO disc referred
to above would also be a worthwhile
addition to the Holst shelf – not least
for the complete Cotswold Symphony and
alternative versions of the Whitman
Overture and the Hampshire Suite.
The liner notes for
the present CD are by author unnamed
– presumably Lewis Foreman?
Not perhaps the most
essential of Holst collections but invaluable
at satisfying Holstian curiosity. In
doing so are revealed three works written
in fully mature voice and two from the
time when Holst was feeling his way
– professionally done but not out of
his most personal stock.
Rob Barnett
for
details
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Nicholas
Braithwaite 
