Gustav Holst - Ballet Music (Richard Hickox)

Information

Composer: Gustav Holst

• Ballet from 'The Perfect Fool', opera, Op. 39
• The Golden Goose, choral ballet, Op. 45 No. 1
• The Lure, ballet music for orchestra
• The Morning of the Year, choral ballet, Op. 45 No. 2

Joyful Company of Singers

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Richard Hickox, conductor

Date: 2009

Label: Chandos

https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%205069

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Review

Though our modern age continues to extol The Planets as most archetypal of its composer, this recording of music written and completed during the 1920s serves only to reiterate that Holst’s musical purview was much broader, and while he never enjoyed recognition for his ballet music (with the exception perhaps of The Perfect Fool as an orchestral suite), his originality rarely faltered. All the works featured here – a “must” for all Holst fans – reveal how he built steadily on the experimental paradigms of The Planets with an orchestral technique second-to-none, “naked” (as Vaughan Williams once described) in its exposed, gossamer textures.

Holst’s distinctive sound is carefully manicured in this recording; the rapid “mercurial” passages of string- and wind-writing of The Perfect Fool are delivered with exemplary crispness and vitality; the superimposed fourth harmonies of the unfamiliar The Lure, which develop mysterious bitonal “saturnine” textures, look forward to the composer’s unaccompanied choral masterpiece The Evening Watch as well as the desolate landscape of Egdon Heath, while the two choral ballets, The Golden Goose and The Morning of the Year (the former being weaker in quality) ebb and flow between Jovian elation and the more bizarre neo-classicism hinted at in Uranus and the strange modernist textures of the later Choral Fantasia. Hickox certainly brings an electric appeal to these little-known, pointillistic scores as does the more finely tuned sense of ensemble between mystical voices and orchestra.

Perhaps the most compelling item on this disc, however, is The Lure which gives us a “reworking” of The Perfect Fool but with a different climactic outcome derived from the warmer timbres and harmonies of the Ode to Death.

-- Jeremy Dibble, Gramophone

More reviews:

https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2009/jan09/holst1_hickox_chsa5069.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jan/02/holst-classical-hickox-review-music

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Holst-Perfect-Golden-Goose-Morning/dp/B001KS96OW

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Gustav Holst (21 September 1874 – 25 May 1934) was an English composer and teacher. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford. Holst served as musical director at Morley College from 1907 to 1924, and pioneered music education for women at St Paul's Girls' School from 1905 until his death in 1934. He was an important influence on younger English composers, including Edmund Rubbra, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten. Apart from The Planets and a handful of other works, his music was generally neglected until the 1980s, when recordings of much of his output became available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Holst

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Richard Hickox (5 March 1948 – 23 November 2008) was an English conductor of choral, orchestral and operatic music. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, then was an organ scholar at Queens' College, Cambridge. Hickox founded the City of London Sinfonia, as well as the Richard Hickox Singers and Orchestra, in 1971. He was Chorus Director of the London Symphony Chorus (1976 to 1991), Artistic Director of the Northern Sinfonia (1982 to 1990), Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (2000 to 2006), and Music Director of Opera Australia (2005 to 2008).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hickox

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