Gustav Holst: Undiscovered

Gustav Holst’s spectacular orchestral suite The Planets, composed during World War I, remains a worldwide hit. Yet there is still much of his music being rediscovered, even as we celebrate his 150th anniversary this year. This playlist celebrates the extraordinary range of styles he mastered through his relatively short career. Holst’s close friendship with Vaughan Williams famously introduced him to authentic folk song, which helped him forge a distinctly English style. You’ll hear this in A Somerset Rhapsody, a strikingly atmospheric and dramatic tapestry woven from several folk songs from that English county. Yet before then, Holst had earned Vaughan Williams’ admiration through his strongly individual voice. Try the spooky “Adagio” from Holst’s 1890s Sextet in E minor, which seems to tap into the Gothic imagination of his artist great uncle, Theodor von Holst, illustrator of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Holst reworked elements of this movement in his Symphony “The Cotswolds”, as well as parts of his exuberant “Scherzo” for string sextet—compare this with the Symphony’s lively “Scherzo”. Another “Scherzo”, all he completed of a final symphony before his death in 1934 aged 59, shows his deft ability at the end of his life to suggest whole worlds and a range of colours in a dizzyingly short space. From the same period comes his autumnal Lyric Movement for solo viola and orchestra, which blends poignant lyricism with a touch of bleakness before reaching its transfiguring end. Explore, too, Holst’s songs, still unknown by many, including the unnerving “Betelgeuse” from 12 Humbert Wolfe Songs, composed in the late 1920s. Even lesser known are the striking and often beautiful songs he wrote in the 1890s, such as the eerie and haunting “Slumber-Song”, or “Margrete’s Cradle-Song”. Holst’s choral music, which he composed throughout his career, includes some of his most poignant and best-loved work. These range from the intimate folksong arrangements such as “I Love My Love” to the stirring, large-scale pageant The Coming of Christ, first performed in the great spaces of Canterbury Cathedral. And try his 1919 Walt Whitman setting for chorus and orchestra Ode to Death, written in memory of friends who fell during World War I and considered by many of Holst’s close friends and colleagues his greatest and most beautiful work.