Customer Reviews

The British Music Collection: Gustav Holst

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"Gee, I like this piece, 'The Planets'. I wonder if this guy Holst wrote anything else?" Welcome, music lover. This collection is the next step after Holst's most popular piece. The otherworldliness of the "Hymns from the Rig Veda" may surprise you, as they prepare you for the world of "Savitri", based on a folk tale from India. Want to fall in love all over again? Young Janet Baker will melt your heart as the heroine of this 3 character/1 act opera, conducted by the composer's daughter. A stunning performance, in lovely 1960's sound. This set is worth it for the first disc alone.

I'm not as familiar with some of the other performances, but the pieces are a good sampling of Holst's "other" works, and the "Moorside Suite" will blow you away. It is arguably the best piece ever written for a brass band.

Every so often a twinge of conscience combined with an impulse of curiosity cause me to revisit Holst in the hope that I shall come away newly enthused by his music. I am certainly no expert, but I must assume that Decca has assembled here a representative sample of his best pieces. He seems to have had a penchant for miniatures oddly infused with an uneasy admixture of oriental mysticism, English folk melodies and modernist experimentalism which produces peculiar incongruities - or a delightful, offbeat and eclectic inventiveness, depending on your response. I have once or twice previously been admonished for reviewing music which I don't particularly like and much of this falls into that category, but I don't see the value of forbidding sceptics from voicing an opinion; the Amazon reader is a big boy/girl who can come to his/her own conclusions. I shall also try to write a critique of this 2 disc set without mentioning You Know Which Work by Holst - even if its thumbprints are all over the harmonies and orchestration of some of the music here.

The best work here, as a previous reviewer notes, is the chamber opera "Savitri", mainly because of its distinct sound world and a youthful Janet Baker, who is in meltingly beautiful voice and makes much of the character of Savitri, the wife whose devotion to her husband allows her to cheat Death and win back Satyavan from Death's clutches. Death himself is competently but palely sung by baritone Thomas Hemsley (wrongly designated as a bass in the listing) and out of respect for Robert Tear, who passed away a fortnight ago, I shall draw a veil over my antipathy to English (actually, he was Welsh) tenors...

I know Holst wrote for his school orchestra but I do not imagine that will stand as an excuse for the school orchestra standard of playing in some of the earlier pieces recorded here, viz. the ill-tuned double basses and woodwind at the start of "Egdon Heath"; Sir Adrian must have had a good lunch to tolerate it. Puzzlingly, the sound here is pretty tubby compared with the much better quality of the ballet suite from "The Perfect Fool" which was recorded in the same year, 1962.

The "St Paul Suite" is a jolly little thing, whereas the ballet suite has pretensions to more substance and the music here is most reminiscent of "The Pl -..." - sorry, Holst's most famous work, with certain effects, such as little figures for the chirruping, twittering flutes and chattering lower woodwind sounding as if they have been lifted direct from that earlier er...celestial suite. For me, "Egdon Heath" goes absolutely nowhere and I remain utterly mystified, not to mention bored, by the musical idiom of "The Hymn of Jesus", being another odd amalgam of chant, spoken and sung declamation and dance rhythms. The choir is very recessed and their words incomprehensible, but there is no libretto in this bargain issue. "A Moorside Suite" is another curiosity, being a brass band showpiece, very well played and exuding that mournful cosiness typical of the genre.

The pieces I least enjoy are the hymns and part songs on CD 1 too many of which I find mimsy and bloodless in the favoured English "folksy-faery" style similar to that found in Boughton's "The Immortal Hour" but I concede that they may be to others' tastes. My ears pricked up at the beginning of "The Evening Watch" when I believe I detected the uncredited tenor voice of a young Ian Partridge singing with the Purcell Singers.

So I've given Holst another go and found some, limited pleasure in his peculiar and idiosyncratic Anglo-oriental fusion music. You might find more.