Gustav Holst
Works for Chorus and Orchestra

* The Golden Goose, A Choral Ballet
* The Morning of the Year, A Choral Ballet*
* King Estmere, An Old English Ballad for Chorus and Orchestra

Morgan (soprano)*, Beinart (alto)*, Ovenden (tenor)*
Guildford Choral Society, The Philharmonia Orchestra/Hilary Davan Wetton
Hyperion CDA66784 Total time: 72:10

Summary for the Busy Executive: Mostly wonderful.

Mention Holst's name and, if the penny drops into the slot at all, the
little memory-ticket that comes out will be The Planets.  Holst has become
a one-hit-wonder of the classical world, a shame since his catalogue is
stuffed with great work, in many ways more interesting than the success
which happened to last.

This CD, although it makes no claims, I believe consists of all premieres:
the early King Estmere and the complete versions of The Golden Goose and
The Morning of the Year.  Lyrita recorded excerpts from the latter two as
part of its marvelous Holst series, spearheaded by Imogen, the composer's
daughter and champion.  Imogen, an underrated conductor, gave lively
performances of Holst's work.  She also edited many of the scores in order
to secure for them a greater possibility of getting played.  She reduced
The Golden Goose, for example, a work requiring chorus, orchestra, dancers,
and mummers, to its instrumental sections only.  A canny manager of Holst's
posthumous career and a shrewd observer of the modern-music scene, she also
kept hidden much of Holst's early work, as part of a general strategy to
show Holst as a rebel only, rather than as both heir and rebel.  In her
own study of her father's work, she continually stressed the prophetic,
progressive elements in the music and failed to even mention many works.
Only late in life did she open up the trunk.  Thanks to this decision, we
now have recordings of such works as The Mystic Trumpeter, The Cloud
Messenger, and King Estmere.

However, Imogen's presentation of her father distorted his career.  The
Planets, for example, seems to come from nowhere, rather than from Holst's
dogged determination over a period of years to find himself and to improve
his technique.  The latter was especially important to him.  He advised his
friend Vaughan Williams to write the pieces which would enable him to write
better pieces later on.  VW strongly disagreed.  For Holst, technique
cleared a path to personal expression.  For VW, technique was never as
important as the expression.  Vaughan Williams could afford to subordinate
technique's importance, since he had far more of it in his early works than
Holst did.  On the other hand, Vaughan Williams could afford to study in
Germany and France, while Holst had to hustle just to make ends meet.
Holst almost never had the time for composition that his friend did.
Caught in his personal artistic maze, Holst writes operas, suites, chamber
pieces, short orchestral squibs, even most of a symphony, to break through
to himself.  There's a huge amount of work that means aesthetically very
little in itself, if we consider his mature output, but he needed to get it
done.  A drawing instructor once remarked to his students that they each
had to do at least 100,000 bad drawings to become any good.  Holst "did his
stodge" and found his reward.  He begins, in my opinion, to hit the right
road around 1907-1908 with the Two Carols for choir, oboe, and cello and
from then on goes from strength to strength.  The Planets rests on a
mountain of sheer hard work.

King Estmere comes from 1905 and shows us the following.  Holst has
mastered large, complex forces.  His choice of text (from Bishop Percy's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry) - I would suspect particularly the
ballad rhythms of the text - leads him to adopt an idiom influenced by the
modes of English folk song.  The use of the ballad form (the same music for
each stanza) could easily have degenerated into mere repetition, but Holst
knows how to subtly stray from and, just as subtly, to return to the main
material, much as Britten does in the later Ballad of Little Musgrave and
Lady Barnard.  In addition to the quasi-folk idiom, one finds bits of
Parry, Stanford, and even Sullivan's Yeoman of the Guard.  It's a choral
piece from someone apparently untouched by the greater musical and
psychological complexity of Elgar's oratorios.  We also see Holst resorting
to the model of Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung whenever he needs a broad
climax.  If we didn't have The Hymn of Jesus or the other two works on this
program, the work would satisfy in itself.  However, Holst's main appeal,
at least to me, is the originality of his mature idiom, still buried
beneath derivative clutter.

On the other hand, Holst wrote The Golden Goose and The Morning of the
Year, according to Imogen's Thematic Catalogue of Gustav Holst's Music,
consecutively, from 1926 to 1927, well into his artistic maturity.  Holst
called both works "choral ballets," a term which seems to have derived
from the madrigal ballets of the Renaissance and which Bantock seems to
have revived for his Great God Pan, around 1917.  I suspect Holst more
influenced by the Elizabethans than by Bantock.  Despite the identity
of term and forces, the two Holst works aim at different things.  Holst
intended The Golden Goose for amateurs.  Indeed, the first performance was
given with the students of Morley College and St. Paul's Girls' School
(Holst taught at both).  The libretto - a fairy tale about the princess who
never laughed - was devised by Jane M.  Joseph, whom Holst considered his
most promising pupil and who died very young.  Holst also made several
versions of the piece, including one for children and one consisting solely
of instrumental numbers.  As befits a work for amateurs, Holst comes up
with dazzling tunes, nevertheless simple to sing.  The hard work falls
to the orchestra, but even here Holst simplifies.  Holst's maturity is
marked by a concern for a kind of mathematical elegance - that is, as few
notes as possible and each note used to maximum effect - so the kind of
simplification in The Golden Goose doesn't really mean compromise.  Holst
also emphasizes counterpoint at this time - in this work, mostly two-part
counterpoint.  The lines fit together like the sides of a well-made box,
all the more amazing since if you consider each line separately, you'd
likely conclude that it wouldn't go with its partner.  This leads to
great independence of each idea, emphasized by Holst's clear scoring.

The Morning of the Year, on the other hand, holds the honor of the
first work commissioned by the BBC.  It is designed for professionals.
The counterpoint is far more complex, a greater number of lines, and
Holst increases the complexity by writing in at least two keys at
once and in mixed meters, both of which increase the independence of
simultaneously-stated themes.  Holst borrows ideas from his earlier Hymn
of Jesus and Fugal Concerto, neither of them particularly easy.  Holst
conceived of the work as a kind of masque on the English rites of spring,
with singers, dancers, and instrumentalists.  The text concerns nature's
recurring rebirth, mirrored in human pairing and courtship.  The energy of
the piece lies not, as with Stravinsky's Russian rites, in barbarism and
human sacrifice, but in the deep wells of nature's vitality.  Holst's
"characters" are peasants, not primitives.  The Morning of the Year may
have a marginally less appealing surface than The Golden Goose, but it also
holds you more strongly.

The performance is okay, with the orchestra outclassing the singers.  The
Guildford Choral Society comes across as an amateur community group, with
extremely weak sopranos.  Intonation is a little shakey, particularly from
the sopranos, who sing under pitch (almost the right note, but not quite)
almost all the time, but there's no outright disaster.  The orchestra, on
the other hand, gives the performances their zip.  If Wetton had a better
chorus and soloists, this would have been an outstanding CD. As it is,
it's pretty good and, as I say, the only recording of two splendid works.
If you like Holst at all, give this a try.  The sound is fine.

Steve Schwartz