Holst reviews

This beautifully programmed recital will make you want to rush out and buy as many volumes of British songs as you can. It collects – imaginatively, coherently, and to deeply moving effect – 23 songs on the theme of war.

'This latest instalment of Chandos's survey of Holst's orchestral works is far more than a predictable beachcomber's delight,' writes Malcolm Hayes. 'The recorded sound, too, conveys needlepoint detail within a natural-sounding, non-clinical ambience.'

Holst

A Winter Idyll; Symphony in F (The Cotswolds); Invocation; A Moorside Suite; Indra; Scherzo

Guy Johnston (cello), BBC Philharmonic/Andrew Davis

Chandos CHSA 5192 (hybrid CD/SACD)   77:02 mins

With its opening fanfare instantly recognisable to most people from its use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra appears an obvious coupling with The Planets. Yet it is doubly appropriate, since Holst as a trombonist performed in several of Strauss’s tone poems under the composer’s direction during the 1890s.

Two operas, both written in the early 1920s by composers who were close friends, yet utterly different in character: one is Holst’s lively setting of Shakespeare involving Falstaff and his drinking companions, using English folksong in the manner of Stravinsky; the other is Vaughan Williams’s pithy setting of most of Synge’s play about bereavement, set on the Aran islands off the west coast of Ireland.

Punchy, in-your-face accounts, in turbocharged sound – convincing in A Fugal Overture and the Scherzo from Holst’s unfinished Symphony, less so in A Somerset Rhapsody and Egdon Heath.

Malcolm Hayes

Kakhidze’s highly-charged Rachmaninov offers bags of interpretative charisma. The Holst suffers from poor woodwind intonation and the recording gives a wheezy organ undue prominence. 

Erik Levi

Holst’s The Hymn of Jesus is one of his handful of acknowledged masterpieces, combining plainchant melodies and characteristic irregular metres in a setting of an Apocryphal text in which Christ sings and dances with his disciples before the Crucifixion. The Hallé Choir is energetic in the dance and radiant in ecstatic affirmation, with a strong contribution from the Youth Choir’s semi-chorus. The Hallé plays with precise attacks and perfect blending, and Mark Elder directs with sure control of the episodic structure.

There are in fact two premiere complete recordings on this disc, although this is not clear in Naxos’s accompanying booklet. Both A Winter Idyll and Indra have previously appeared in punchy dramatic accounts by David Atherton conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. But where he used scores edited by Colin Matthews, JoAnn Falletta on Naxos conducts from original manuscripts, including for the first time several bars cut by Matthews.

A not over-sumptuous Planets, magnificently played. But Ormandy’s way with the ‘Jupiter’ big tune repels; and ‘Mercury’ is slow. Stellar competition elsewhere. Malcolm Hayes

With so many recordings of Holst’s Planets, it can be all too easy for both orchestras and their audiences to take this colourful suite for granted.

Resplendently engineered and commandingly played, this is a product of Svetlanov’s low-voltage late period, sadly lacking in the elemental drive of his classic years with Melodiya. Julian Haylock

A marvellous collection of relatively unfamiliar works by diverse composers, most of whom wrote little music for piano. McCabe is an outstanding advocate, effortlessly capturing the spirit of these assorted gems. Christopher Dingle