Gustav Holst
Early and Late
* Symphony in F, op. 8 "The Cotswolds"^
* Walt Whitman Overture, op. 7^
* A Hampshire Suite, op. 28/2^
* The Perfect Fool Ballet Music
* Scherzo for Orchestra
^ World premiere recording
Munich Symphony/Douglas Bostock
Classico CLASSCD284 Total time: 65:00
Summary for the Busy Executive: Missing the missing link.
Mature Holst mixes with juvenilia, including two world recording
premieres -- the complete Cotswolds Symphony and the Walt Whitman Overture.
Holst's creation over roughly twenty years of a personal idiom constituted
no small part of his aesthetic achievement. He had come through composition
study with Stanford possessing a solid technique, further refined by
practical experience as a professional orchestral trombonist. But Holst
suffered the trial of most artists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries: the suspicion and the despair that everything had
already been done. In England, the figures of Brahms and Wagner loomed
very large indeed. Holst felt he had to, in his own words, "find himself"
as a composer, and what's more he felt it as an almost moral imperative.
It increased his already prodigious capacity for hard work. According
to Imogen Holst's chronological thematic catalogue of her father's work,
Holst wrote over 80 compositions -- including the symphony here, an
opera, several tone poems and cantatas, and a lot of big chamber works
-- before he hit on what we would now consider a fully characteristic
piece: the Hymns from the Rig Veda, op. 24. The Planets, op. 32, is
catalogue #125. One wants to know how he got from Stanford to himself.
Unfortunately, this CD doesn't answer that question, and one experiences
a severe disconnect between the Whitman overture and, for example, The
Perfect Fool ballet music. We have here the beginnings and, with the
Scherzo, the literal end, but not the journey or the momentous turn
itself.
The Walt Whitman Overture (1899) comes across as almost pure Stanford,
with occasional "touches" of orchestration taken from Wagner. Trying
to find the seeds of the mature Holst, we detect a penchant for economy
and for directness of thought as well as for "lean" orchestration. It's
considerably thicker than the Real Holst, but svelte compared even to
Stanford. It's almost Sullivanesque. It lacks, however, Holst's
characteristic voice. There's less Holst in this than there is, for
example, of Vaughan Williams in Toward the Unknown Region (1906).
The Symphony of 1899-1900, however, shows a real advance -- a greater
assurance in handling long forms and a greater determination to say
something one truly wants to say, but only within movements. The movements
taken as a whole are a hodge-podge of styles. The first movement, for
example, delightfully vigorous and concise as hell, nevertheless sounds
like the twee Olde Englishe music from the second rank of the middle-to-late
Nineteenth Century. Every once in a while, one hears the Holst of the
"Marching Song" (Two Songs Without Words) trying to peek out. Far and
away the finest movement is the second, an Elegy ("In Memoriam William
Morris"). This has been earlier and separately recorded, along with
other Holst rarities, by David Atherton in Lyrita's magnificent Holst
series (SRCD.209). Holst in his youth had more or less hovered on the
fringes of British Socialism. To the Fabians, Morris was, of course, was
one of the great social prophets and Whitman the great singer. Atherton's
reading stresses the Wagnerian influences -- the obvious inspiration of
Siegfried's funeral march from Goetterdaemmerung and certain harmonic
progressions. Bostock shows us Saturn about to come around the corner.
Influence aside, Holst constructs an impressive arch of nearly ten
minutes. The scherzo third movement lets us down with a thump. Most
Modern composers found their way to Modernism in scherzo movements,
where they felt permitted to indulge themselves in "the grotesque,"
just as most eighteenth-century poets found their way from Classicism
to Romanticism through the genre of the ode. All that is missing here.
With the exception of the lean scoring, Holst is firmly stuck in the
past. You may well ask whether he needs to be FutureBoy. The Morris
elegy shows that he doesn't, but the scherzo's material and the
thematic treatment is far less distinguished, even at time cliched. The
beautifully-orchestrated finale, in striding triple-time, shows Holst
reaching back through Stanford to Brahms, with a marvelous Big Tune in
the second subject group of the same family as the main theme of the
Brahms First. The development isn't up to Brahms, however, and in any
case that kind of textural and motific complication was always foreign
to Holst. Nevertheless, the movement coheres and says what it needs to
without resorting to rhetorical inflation.
I don't consider A Hampshire Suite a genuine work by Holst. Gordon
Jacob orchestrated Holst's second suite for band for orchestra. I have no
idea why. Unlike Jacob's similarly disappointing arrangement of Vaughan
Williams's English Folk-Song Suite, it hasn't caught on. I gripe about
it mainly because, although pretty, it doesn't sound particularly like
Holst, and Holst's original does. Jacob fails to imagine how Holst would
have integrated the strings, and the string writing itself doesn't sound
particularly Holstian -- amazing, when you consider that Holst himself
arranged the last movement for strings as part of his St. Paul's Suite.
By the time of the opera The Perfect Fool (1920-22), Holst could look
back on his early Wagnerisms and, as the title suggests, kid himself
about them. The ballet music has proved far more popular than the opera
itself. I wonder how many people still alive have ever heard the complete
opera. I certainly haven't. At any rate, the alert aficionado of the
Ring will find little twists on major Leitmotivs and gestures in the
ballet music, beginning with the opening trombone solo.
Holst wrote the Scherzo as part of a larger symphony. This was the only
movement and the very last piece he completed before he died, relatively
young, in 1934. Despite his considerable achievement, Holst felt as if
he were really just getting started. There's the famous story of him
listening to a radio broadcast of Schubert's cello quintet and realizing
that what had been missing in his music was warmth. I think him way too
hard on himself, but I do agree that the Scherzo represents a new vitality
in his music, a willingness to tackle big things. I've always felt --
in no small measure because of this work -- that Holst's story was left
unsatisfyingly unfinished. The music is part "Mercury," part "Mars,"
part "Spirits of Earth" (the Perfect Fool ballet), with a spontaneous
power to it, as if it speeds into the listener's ear directly for the
heart without a hitch. At the same time, it shows Holst's mature concision
and the harmonic language of his late period -- teetering on the edge
of two keys, or standing with a foot on either side of the divide. Boult
loved to perform the piece and recorded it on Lyrita SRCD.222. That
symphony would have been a beaut, even alongside such monuments as the
Vaughan Williams Fourth and the Walton First.
Bostock does what he can for the early stuff. It's much better than all
right when Holst gives him something reasonable to work with. Indeed, I
prefer his reading of the Morris elegy to Atherton's, for the reason I
mentioned. It's also more spacious, closer I think to the inexorable
tread of a true Holstian adagio. A Hampshire Suite never gets off the
ground, in large part due to Jacob, but also to Bostock, who, by taking
it a hair slower than he should, tromps through the first movement, and
who fails to bounce in the last. The ballet music is okay, but you have
many, many choices including Previn and Boult, both of them top-notch.
Though Bostock and Boult run neck and neck in their timings of the Scherzo
(Boult slightly faster), Boult leads with a greater sense of urgency and
exposes the nerve more than a relatively relaxed Bostock, who lets the
music breathe a bit. I prefer Boult, though I recognize that others may
prefer Bostock's gentler approach.
Steve Schwartz
|
