Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
HOLST 150
Sāvitri Op.25 (1908-09 rev. 1916)
Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda (3^rd Group) (1909-10)
Four Songs for Voice and Violin (1916-17)
The Evening Watch Op.43 No.1 (1924)
Hammersmith: A Prelude & Scherzo for Orchestra Op.52 (1930)
The Perfect Fool – Ballet Music (1918-22)
The Planets Op.32 (1914-17)
rec. 1945-65
SOMM Recordings Ariadne 5030 [2 CDs: 129]

Back in 2022 as part of the Vaughan Williams 150^th Anniversary, SOMM released a series of archival recordings of famed conductors specifically associated with that composer. Quite rightly, these releases were highly praised for the calibre of their technical restoration and the importance of their artistic and historical value. As part of a substantial number of new releases across all of Vaughan Williams’ output they were a valuable, often revelatory, contribution.

Given the success of that enterprise, it is no real surprise that SOMM have decided to repeat the formula two years later now we have reached Gustav Holst’s same anniversary. The good news is that the similar high values of artists, repertoire and restoration have been repeated. The sad fact – for which SOMM have no responsibility! – is that this release is one of very few to mark this important anniversary, although the Holst Society has just distributed two CDs devoted to Holst and his contemporaries on the Albion label and a Holst at 150 brass celebration including both father and daughter has been issued on the Doyen label – the fifth and sixth recordings issued since the establishment of the Holst Society in 2017. Using Presto Classical’s search tool filtering by “Holst/Release Date” rather starkly there has not otherwise been a single new release in 2024 devoted to just Gustav Holst – Imogen has an interesting disc out in September! Aside from the ubiquitous The Planets there is not much for commercially-orientated labels to generate significant sales from. So rather than being an interesting appendix to a wider celebration, this two-disc set becomes one of the main releases – unless anything else is scheduled for the remaining four months of the year. Further good news regarding this release is the quality of the performances but more to the point the repertoire chosen. Pretty much everyone from the composer himself onwards accepted the popularity of The Planets while not feeling it showed the composer at his most original and best. The first of the two CD’s here includes Sāvitri, one of the sets of the Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, The Evening Watch and for me one of the absolute jewels in Holst’s composing crown; the Four Songs for Voice and Violin. All four works present the kind of sensual austerity that typifies Holst at his best. If that description appears oxymoronic, by that I mean fervent and often passionate music and ideas expressed with the fewest musical gestures and thinnest instrumental textures. Of course there are parts of The Planets which achieve that too but the general sense in that work is one of scale and opulence.

All but one of the performances presented here are first releases of live/broadcast performances recorded off-air. The exception is the Four Songs which were pre-recorded. CD1 opens with a performance form the 1956 Aldeburgh Festival of Sāvitri which by any measure is a genuine masterpiece. Holst essayed operatic or quasi-operatic form around eight times across his career – not including the Choral-Ballets. None can be said to be unqualified successes except for Sāvitri. Here, Holst achieves a concision of form and expression that is dramatically powerful and musically compelling. All the more remarkable for the fact it was written as early as 1908-9 (with a minor revision in 1916) and is a genuine chamber opera lasting just 29:55 here and written for three singing roles plus an off-stage female chorus accompanied by a double string quartet, double bass and three wind. Of course by the time of this Aldeburgh performance Britten had created a body of fine Chamber Operas with his remarkable Turn of the Screw dating from just a couple of years before this recording. It is interesting to note that Arda Mandikian who sings the title role here created the ghostly role of Miss Jessel alongside Pears’ Quint. The orchestra here is likewise the same English Opera Group while conductor – a young 31 year old – Charles Mackerras was very much part of the Britten/Aldeburgh scene until he got frozen out a couple of years later for an inopportune remark.

The other two singing roles are taken by a fresh-voiced Peter Pears as Satyavān and Thomas Hemsley as Death. Hemsley would record the role for what is still the reference recording on Decca conducted by Imogen Holst and with Janet Baker famously as Sāvitri a decade after this performance. Baker is predictably superb but of course she is a mezzo-soprano, as is Felicity Palmer on the only other well-known/more recent recording on Hyperion with Richard Hickox. The really striking feature of this Aldeburgh performance is the sheer drama of Mandikian’s interpretation allied to Mackerras’ equally powerful conducting. Together they achieve a compelling intensity at the climax of the work; Sāvitri’s extended appeal to Death that without Satyavān she will have no life herself. I do not think I have ever heard this sung with such expressive power. Hemsley is as impeccably steady as he is a decade later but the laurels rest with Mandikian. The main issue with this recording is the recording. The voices are pretty well caught and indeed the off-stage female voices evoking the spirits or the forest are effective and manage a degree of front to back distance. Sadly, the orchestral contribution – perfectly well played of course – is rather congested and lacking detail. As I suggested earlier, Holst achieves some remarkably individual and attractive textures from a very limited instrumental palette but you will work hard to hear much here. As with several of the performances here, applause (rather lukewarm it must be said) is retained.

The remaining works on disc 1 were recorded/broadcast as part of the 1965 Cheltenham Festival – that being the town where Holst was born. Two of these were conducted by Imogen Holst; The Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda – Group 3 for female chorus and harp and The Evening Watch. Both of these works were also recorded as part of the studio [Kingsway Hall] Sāvitri by Imogen Holst with the same chorus but different harpist in 1965. My iteration of the CD does not specify exactly when so I do not know which performances were recorded first. Interestingly, they are quite different in conception with the first Hymn to the Dawn much slower, more ethereal and mysterious in the Decca studio version than the rather hearty Cheltenham equivalent. The BBC recording is perfectly good although not as sophisticated as the Decca – engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson – which still sounds remarkably fine given its near 60 year old provenance. The Decca recording also blends the voices better – the BBC spotlights a rather prominent and matronly voice or two. The second and fourth songs are a little nimbler in the Decca version and by the 4^th song – Hymn to the Travellers – Michael Jefferies’ harp has started to slip out of tune. The Evening Watch was written in 1925 at a point in his life when Holst had to give up the regular burden of class teaching due to ill-health.  The silver lining was that he was able to focus every day on composition at his Thaxted home. The Decca liner notes the work was considered “too austere” for its 1920s audience and it fell out of print for 30 years until 1965.  SOMM’s liner writer Simon Heffer refers to its “purity born of restraint” which is a very neat and precise description. Roll back a century and the Times critic called it “a piece of barren construction” which is head-shakingly cloth-eared. This is a miniature masterpiece – just 4:46 in Cheltenham but 4:19 for Decca. The SOMM liner lists the two significant soloists as Pauline Stevens and the great Ian Partridge (not yet thirty when he made this recording). Both performances are very good and both underline what a understatedly modern work this still sounds with perhaps Bax’s remarkable Mater Ora Filium and This Worldes’ Joie the closest equivalent British works from around this time.

A decade earlier than this extraordinary work is another jewel; the Four Songs for Voice and Violin. These were famously inspired by Holst overhearing a young woman (a Morley College pupil – Christine Ratcliffe) accompanying herself singing on the violin.  The words were taken from “A Medieval Anthology” and although musically slight in durational terms – the four songs last just less than 8:00 here combined – they represent an important step forward for Holst. In his book “Gustav Holst, The Man and his Music” [pub. Oxford University Press 1990] Micheal Short writes; “In these songs, Holst gave a new rhythmic freedom to the musical expression of the words – deriving from the metrical flexibility of English folk-song – and concluded that this was the best way to set the English language to music”. As such, it can be seen – and heard – that Holst’s approach to word-setting was framed by this miniature cycle. Additionally – in the spirit of sensually austere – the texts (not included in the booklet but they can be found online) hover between chaste religious devotion and something altogether more fleshly; “My soul has nought but fire & ice” opens the second song. The performers here are soprano Honor Sheppard and violinist Nona Liddell. For such a key work, these have been surprisingly little recorded.  A 1967 Argo recording had Peter Pears singing the tenor alternative. By then his voice had tightened and in any case the two performers need to be sharing the same tessitura which clearly a tenor does not – for me this must be sung by a soprano. More recently Susan Gritton shared a Collins (latterly on Naxos) recording with violinist Louisa Fuller. I prefer Gritton to Honor Sheppard but I prefer Liddell – more dramatic, more involved – to the poised but slightly well-mannered Fuller. Sheppard sings well but it is a rather generalised, un-searching version. Her tone is attractively even and carefully placed but expressively unvaried. Not knowing her name, a quick search online revealed several glowing assessments of her work – everything from being a baroque specialist to taking part in the first professional performance of Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony just a year after these songs were recorded. I can only think she did not have the time to fully absorb the idiom and nuances before this performance was given with the result beautiful but lacking insight. This piece has yet to receive the performance it deserves.

The only disappointing performance on this pair of discs is Norman Del Mar with the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing the orchestral version of Hammersmith – Prelude and Scherzo from Cheltenham in 1965. The work – which can be heard at the 2024 BBC Proms – is an evocative and atmospheric piece but the performance here suffers from being rather leaden, without much polish in the playing, and having a slightly raucous off-air recording. If you compare it – perhaps unfairly – with Boult’s Lyrita studio performance, originally released on LP in 1972 – it crackles with an energy and dynamism which quite eludes Del Mar and the BBC SO. A more interesting version of Egdon Heath – a masterpiece missing from this survey – would perhaps have been a better choice.

Disc two is given over to just two works with the work of audio restoration being handed from Paul Baily to Lani Spahr.  Opening the disc is Malcom Sargent conducting the ace NBC Symphony in the Ballet Suite from The Perfect Fool under wartime conditions in 1945 from Radio City Studio 8-H. Both this performance and the following Planets retain the audience applause and the back-announcement from the radio presenter. Sargent’s involvement with Holst was significant if not as substantial as, say, Boult with Vaughan Williams. A thirty-year-old Sargent conducted the premiere of At the Boar’s head in 1925 and a year before this broadcast performance his recording of The Hymn of Jesus was released by EMI. Sargent is certainly quite individual with this work. The opening is suitably imperious – Holst always wrote effectively for his “own” instrument the trombone and the opening pages scamper and scurry effectively. At the beginning of Dance of the Spirits of Earth, Sargent ignores the clear crochet = crochet marking in the score and pulls back on the basic tempo (this marking was an indication to the conductor that although the “feel” might change the tempo of the basic pulse, here a crochet should stay the same). I imagine this is to provide greater contrast with the concluding fast section of this tri-partite score. Although the sound is generally a little muffled, Spahr – as he did on the Vaughan Williams restorations – has done a tremendous job creating a very stable and undistorted sound picture. Yes of course the dynamic range is limited and some disc swish and carrier wave hiss remains but the music and the details of the score are enjoyably present although the bass is fairly boomy. The central Dance of the Spirits of Water flows (pardon the pun) nicely although quite matter-of-factly. The biggest surprise is the helter-skelter tempo of the closing Dance of the Spirits of Fire which is marked just allegro moderato but I have never heard as fast as here. Holst does mark a piu mosso followed by an accel but coming from an already quick tempo this tests even the virtuosi of the NBC SO and the result teeters on the edge of gabbled collapse. Sargent does briefly observe the Tempo 1 marking but an unprinted extra accelerando means the hectic pace is soon resumed. An unwritten ritardando has to be deployed as speed breaks to get the music back to the original Andante before a closing ff chord.  In the heat of a concert it is certainly an exciting and wild ride but it does not sound very controlled.

The presence of yet another version of The Planets might seem unimaginative or unnecessary or both, but in fact the performance here by Adrian Boult and the Boston Symphony Orchestra provides the listener with a really interesting and valuable insight into the conductor’s mind as much as the composer’s. Famously Holst wrote in his copy of the score; “This copy is the property of Adrian Boult who first caused The Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst.” Boult made five commercial recordings of the work with the first in 1945 with his ‘own’ BBC SO which I reviewed as part of a bargain box set eleven years ago here – so the obvious comparison to make is between studio and live Boult less than a year apart.  This performance of The Planets was part of the same series of concerts Boult gave with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in early 1946 that produced the stunning Vaughan Williams Job I reviewed here. The result is a Planets that is an amalgam of what Boult could do best. He always had an unerring sense of structure and pacing but in live performance there is a distinct sense that he was willing to be more impulsive and push the expressive boundaries more – sometimes opting for faster tempi and sometimes slower. Here is a table I made for my 2013 review with the Boston live recording now in place of Boult’s 1961 Vienna version and a live BBC Proms performance available on a BBC Music Magazine cover disc added;

The key here is not so much whether this movement is quicker here than there but rather how the live performances tend to show the (relative) extremes of Boult’s range of tempi. Focussing on the Boston performance; the first three versions are consistent in their approach with a 5/4 rhythm that just tips into a 2 beat 3+2, whereas the latest recording is definitely conducted in 5. The slow tempo of Venus jumps out of the above table but this is also reflected in a more Romantic, almost passionate, version than I have heard from Boult before. Certainly alongside the slightly no-nonsense 1944 BBC it feels quite a bit freer. Interestingly, I found the extended violin solos in Job to “have a tenderness and simple expressivity that is completely disarming” – here the unnamed leader uses some discreet portamenti that are certainly of the period but were absent for Job. Mercury is noticeably quicker than other versions. Spahr has done an excellent job stabilising the sound picture here but of course there is considerable dynamic compression across the work that can make a movement such as this sound more muscular than it probably was. What is noticeable is the virtuosity of the Boston players who clearly respond to the music. My response to this Jupiter is very similar to what I wrote for the BBC SO recording; “forthright – unfussy – direct”. There is a sturdy direct simplicity to the “I vow to thee my country” tune that is all the better for its unaffectedness. Saturn has all the weighty weariness the timing above might suggest – again, I find myself enjoying Boult responding to the one-off live audience to push his interpretative envelope further than he might do in the carefully controlled studio environment. The closing two movements both suffer to some degree from the sonic limitations of the off-air recording with the mighty climax of Uranus becoming a wall of undifferentiated sound. Ironically it is the quiet and dynamically ‘stable’ Neptune that suffers most of all. The dynamic has been compressed so the pp and quieter dynamics barely register as such and towards the end – hence the question mark as to the timing – as the orchestra and ladies choir fade into oblivion (the latter conducted by one Arthur Fiedler!), quite where the playing ends and the recording noise takes is unclear. But again, worth noting Boult’s willingness to create a sense of stasis and chill with a daringly slow basic tempo. This simply serves to underline what a radical movement this was for 1917 – a kind of proto-minimalism before the term existed.

The great sorrow with Holst is imagining what he might have been able to go onto write if he had been blessed with the more robust health and personal wealth of a Vaughan Williams. After all, the 150^th anniversary of his birth is also the 90^th anniversary of his death – the pictures of the 60 year old composer before his death show a man old before his years. As usual, SOMM have produced an intelligently programmed, very well restored survey that includes several key – yet potentially unfamiliar – works. The absence of any texts is a shame, although that aside, the SOMM presentation is typically good. The performing highlights are undoubtedly Mandikian’s assumption of the title role in Sāvitri and Boult’s imaginative and individual Planets. This is a valuable document in this anniversary year, although it must be hoped that other labels have some new treasures yet to be released.

Nick Barnard

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Performance details
Sāvitri
Arda Mandikian (soprano); Peter Pears (tenor); Thomas Hemsley (baritone)
English Opera Group Chorus & Orchestra / Charles Mackerras
rec. live, 22 June 1956, Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh
Choral hymns from the Rig Veda
Michael Jeffries (harp); Purcell Singers / Imogen Holst
rec. live Town Hall, Cheltenham, 6 July, 1965
Four Songs
Honor Sheppard (soprano); Nona Lidell (violin)
rec. Town Hall, Cheltenham, July, 1965. Broadcast 31 October 1965
The Evening Watch
Pauline Stevens (mezzo-soprano); Ian Partridge (tenor); Purcell Singers / Imogen Holst
rec. Town Hall, Cheltenham, July, 1965. Broadcast 31 October 1965
Hammersmith
BBC Symphony Orchestra / Norman del Mar
rec. live Town Hall, Cheltenham, 9 July, 1965
The Perfect Fool
NBC symphony Orchestra / Malcolm Sargent
rec. live 11 March 1945, Radio City Studio 8H, New York City
The Planets
Boston Symphony Orchestra & Women’s Chorus / Sir Adrian Boult
rec. live 2 February 1936, Symphony Hall, Boston