“The Planets” by Gustav Holst is one of the most popular and most recorded work in English music. Yet, apart from the tunes for the hymn “I Vow to Thee, My Country” and the carol “In the Bleak Midwinter”, most of Holst’s other music is neglected, unjustly so.
Holst was an unconventional man who led something of a double life. He was a vegetarian and spent most of his working life as Director of Music in a girls’ school, but he embraced Hindu philosophy and taught himself Sanskrit. One holiday he lived in a street of brothels in Algiers and cycled into the Sahara Desert. He believed that music should be available for everyone and was appointed conductor of a Socialist choir and Director of Music in Morley College, an institution set up for the educational benefit of working men and women. He championed the amateur musician and famously said, “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”. In fact he was a talented conductor and produced performances of real quality.
After the success of “The Planets”, first performed in 1917, he never wrote a similar orchestral work, and dedicated himself mainly to vocal and choral music, much of which was based on Sanskrit texts for which he provided his own translation.
He was also working at a time when musicians were beginning to wake up to the huge wealth of English folk music, and many of his compositions are imbued with that folk-song quality which gives them great charm.
This lecture will examine Holst’s life, the creation of “The Planets” and will explore many of his other works, including his ‘Oriental’ suite “Beni Mora” which was inspired by hearing a flute-player in Algiers, his “Choral Symphony”, a marvellous piece which sets poetry by Keats, and the settings of the Rig Veda, some of the most important Hindu texts. His so-called serious orchestral works do not follow convention. For example, his concerto for oboe and flute suddenly breaks into a nursery rhyme.
It will be a surprising and revealing lecture, which is richly illustrated with musical examples.
Special Interest Day
This can be a two or three-session day, with the above lecture as its first session.
Please contact me for details of the rest of the day.