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Holst: Orchestral Works, Vol 1 - Hickox

Holst: Orchestral Works, Vol 1 - Hickox

Chandos  CHSA 5069

Stereo/Multichannel Hybrid

Classical - Orchestral


Gustav Holst: The Morning of the Year, The Lure, The Golden Goose, The Ballet from "The Perfect Fool"

Joyful Company of Singers
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Richard Hickox (conductor)


Richard Hickox, one of the foremost exponents of British music, embarks on his survey of orchestral works by Holst with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

The Planets is at the heart of the English repertoire, yet much of Holst’s orchestral output is unjustly neglected. This series will demonstrate that Holst was a composer of great inventiveness.

Volume 1 offers three rarely recorded works, the ballets The Lure (its first time to CD), The Golden Goose and The Morning of the Year, alongside the more familiar Ballet from the one-act opera The Perfect Fool, long recognised as one of Holst’s most successful small-scale works.

The Golden Goose and The Morning of the Year are known as ‘choral ballets’. The Golden Goose was composed for Morley College, where Holst had been Director of Music since 1907, and was intended for amateurs. The ballet is based on the Grimms’ fairy tale of the Princess who had never been able to laugh. The Morning of the Year was the first work to be commissioned by the BBC Music Department, and so is an altogether more serious affair and dedicated to the English Folk Dance Society. This is one of Holst’s most impressive fusions of folk music with his own style, and has no need of the stage to make its full impact.

The Lure shares some of the same origins with the Perfect Fool ballet. The music was written in 1918 as incidental music for a play called The Sneezing Charm by Clifford Bax but at the time it was performed neither as a ballet nor as an orchestral piece. Frustrated by the lack of performance, Holst eventually withdrew the work from his list of compositions. Based on a Northumbrian folk tune, it is lively and powerful, and typical of the composer.

Holst had no desire to be predictable and if he has sometimes seemed to be eclipsed by his more gifted contemporaries he remains one of the most original and innovative musicians of the past century. This recorded survey is sure to shine new light on his neglected works and introduce a new audience to his orchestral music.

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Review by Graham Williams - January 15, 2009

This was to be the first volume on Chandos of a series of recordings devoted to the music of Gustav Holst and conducted by Richard Hickox. The untimely death of the conductor in November 2008 means that the rest of the projected series might never materialise. To many listeners Holst is known only as the composer of ‘The Planets’, so it is fitting that such a fine conductor and champion of English music as Hickox should have begun his survey with this superb disc of ballet music, which shows the originality and inventiveness of Holst’s writing outside his most popular composition.

The most familiar item on this SACD is the ballet music for Holst’s unsuccessful comic opera ‘The Perfect Fool’, a satire on Wagner’s Parsifal. However, the opening ballet, which is danced by the Spirits of Earth, Water and Fire, has always had an independent existence in the concert hall.
Hickox and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales give an exceptionally vivid account of the work, full of energy and benefiting from the spacious Chandos recording in which every detail of Holst’s brilliant and colourful orchestration is crystal clear. This ranges from the raucous trombone fanfares that open the piece to the glacial harp and celesta in the central Dance of Spirits of Water and finally the pounding percussion throughout the Dance of the Spirits of Fire.

The other purely orchestral composition on the disc is ‘The Lure’ written in 1921 to a rather slight scenario by the American artist and patron of the arts Alice Barney about moths dancing round a candle flame. Surprisingly, it was never performed either as a ballet or an orchestral piece and Holst eventually withdrew it from his list of compositions. In spite of being only ten minutes in duration, it is packed full of exciting and colourful writing and, though part of it is based on a Northumbrian folk tune, to this listener it has the character of a lively Spanish dance! Hickox gives a committed performance of the work and the players of the BBC NOW make the most of their many solo opportunities. This is a real discovery.

The two remaining, and longest works, presented here are both described as Choral Ballets.

‘The Golden Goose’ is based on the well-known fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm and consists of seven numbers that include lusty choral contributions from The Joyful Company of Singers in six of them (only the Goose Dance is purely orchestral). The music sounds more English than that of the previous items and at times the Vaughan Williams of ‘Five Tudor Portraits’ and the cantata ‘In Windsor Forest’ is brought to mind. Again Hickox’s performance of this delightful music is everything that one could ask for and the recording does it full justice.

‘The Morning of the Year’ that completes the programme is described as ‘A representation of the mating ordained by Nature to happen in the spring of each year’. Whilst the titles, ‘Dance of Headman and Hobby-horse’, ‘Dance of Youths’, ‘Dance of Maidens’, ‘Mating Dance’ and ‘Dance of the Youngest Couple,’ may suggest something akin to Stravinsky’s Rite, the music is based firmly in the idiom of English folksong and is winningly melodic.

In his informative booklet note, Colin Matthews states that those who know only ‘The Planets’ hardly know Holst at all, so it is to be hoped that this marvellous recording will bring these unjustly neglected works to a much wider audience.

Copyright © 2009 Graham Williams and HRAudio.net

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