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Holst: Gustav Holst
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If you're only ever going to get one disc of the music of Gustav Holst, one of them should be a recording of The Planets. Brilliantly scored, wonderfully evocative, and wholly memorable, The Planets is justly Holst's most popular work and there have been dozens of great recordings of the work from the first Boult to the last. But if you're looking to try a second disc of the music of Gustav Holst, try this one from 1994 by Richard Hickox conducting the London Symphony Orchestra on Chandos. The Lyrita recordings were swell in their day, but for a modern recording of convincing performances of Holst's best orchestral works that aren't The Planets, this disc has got the goods. The London Symphony Orchestra plays as well as it ever has, which is to say, superbly. Hickox conducts with sympathy and strength and he holds the L.S.O.
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Gustav Holst (b.Cheltenham, 21 September 1874; d. London, 25 May 1934) was a famous English composer. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music in London. He ... learned to play the trombone. He became Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammersmith, (London). Some of his music was written for the pupils at this school, for example: the popular St Paul’s Suite (1912-1913) for string orchestra. His most famous work is The Planets (1918).
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![[Cover graphic]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/h/o/l/holst/i/001.jpg)
When Gustav Holst composed his celebrated suite 'The Planets' during the First World War, the solar system was bounded by the orbit of Neptune ('The Mystic' in Holst's astrological subtitle) - which Holst naturally placed at the end of his masterpiece. It was not until fifteen years later that American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, trying to find the reason for peculiarities in Neptune's orbit, realised that there was another planet further out whose gravitational pull was influencing it. And so was discovered the dark, remote and mysterious world of Pluto, named after the king of the Underworld. The discovery was made but three years before Holst's death, but he never expressed any intention of adding it to his by then famous work. Sixty years later, invited to do so by The Hallé Orchestra, the challenge was taken up by Colin Matthews whose 'Pluto - The Renewer' emerges eerily from the disappearing final bars of 'Neptune'. This is the first recording of Holst's 'Planets' with the additional planet, sumptuously recorded by Tony Faulkner in Manchester's Bridgewater Hall.
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Gustav Holst, a socialist composer, was essential to her vision of a community of like-minded artists, and so he came to be one of her tenants. It is not known whether Gustav Holst was introduced to her via Conrad Noel or whether the apparent impulsiveness of Holst's move to Thaxted concealed a more deliberate and long-term plan. Whatever lay behind the move, Gustav Holst delighted his new patron by writing Christian Socialist music for "People's Processions" at Thaxted, and his music always held true to Fabian principles.
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Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham in 1874. He began composing while at Cheltenham Grammar School and spent two months at Oxford learning counterpoint before being sent to London to study composition under Stanford at the Royal College of Music. Stanford found him hardworking but not at all brilliant and their lessons were often frustrating. He met Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1895, the two quickly becoming friends and beginning their lifelong habit of playing sketches of their newest compositions to each other. At college he ... learnt Sanskrit at University College, London and whilst he was never fluent, he was able to read from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and to translate hymns from the Rig Veda.
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Gustavus Theodore von Holst was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1874. His grandfather, Gustavus von Holst of Riga, Latvia, a composer of elegant music for the harp, moved to England and became a fashionable harp teacher. Holst's father Adolph, a pianist, organist and choirmaster, taught piano lessons and gave recitals; his mother, who died when Gustav was only eight, was a singer. A frail child whose first recollections were musical, Holst was taught to play the piano and violin, and began to compose when he was about twelve.
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