Holst: Orchestral Works, Vol 1: Joyful Company of Singers/BBCNOW/Hickox

3 out of 5 3

When he died with such shocking suddenness last month, Richard Hickox's tireless championing of British music for Chandos had just switched its focus to the orchestral works of Gustav Holst. Hickox was recording what would have been the second volume of his survey when he was taken ill, and though that disc now will never be finished, the record company had already scheduled the first instalment for release this month. It brings together all of Holst's scores for dancing, only one of which - the short ballet that begins his long-neglected 1923 comic opera, The Perfect Fool - is ever heard in the concert hall today.

  1. Holst
  2. Ballet from The Perfect Fool; The Lure; The Golden Goose; The Morning of the Year
  3. Joyful Company of Singers/ BBCNOW/ Hickox
  4. (Chandos)

The other three make a curious bunch. The Lure of 1921 was commissioned as a ballet for Chicago, but it was never performed and was eventually excluded from Holst's work list altogether. It's a slight work, barely 10 minutes long. The Golden Goose and The Morning of the Year are more substantial "choral ballets" from 1926 and 1927. They make a strangely matched pair: the first is based upon a Grimm fairytale but somehow manages to incorporate a mummers' play, and the second was commissioned by the fledgling BBC as "a representation of the mating ordained by nature to happen in the spring of each year", with a cast including the obligatory youths and maidens and an offstage chorus representing the voice of nature. The music is more convincing than the scenario, though, with its skilful interpenetration of folk-inspired material in Holst's own style, which, at its best, shows an originality totally distinct from any of Holst's British contemporaries. Later instalments of this series would no doubt have demonstrated that even more clearly. The fact that those discs will probably not be made only makes this release an even more melancholy one.

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