Gustav  Holst, whose family was of Swedish origin and came to England in the nineteenth century from Riga, began composing music while still a student at Cheltenham Grammar School. From there he went in 1892 to the Royal College of Music where he studied composition with Stanford. While still a student Holst developed an interest in Hindu culture and Sanskrit, which he learnt to read at University College, London, and in 1895 he met Vaughan Williams; the two composers became close friends and were to share their new compositions with each other throughout their lives. After leaving the Royal College in 1898, Holst joined firstly the Carl Rosa Opera Company and then the Scottish Orchestra, as a trombonist. He married Isobel Harrison in 1901 and a daughter, Imogen, was born to them in 1907. From 1903 to 1905 Holst taught at James Allen’s Girl’s School in Dulwich and was then appointed director of music at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith in 1905 where he taught for the rest of his life. Further teaching appointments followed: in 1907 he became music director at Morley College for Working Men and Women, and from 1919 he taught at the Royal College of Music and at Reading College.

Between 1914 and 1916 Holst composed probably his best known work, The Planets. The first performance of this took place in 1918 at a private performance financed by another composer, Balfour Gardiner, and conducted, on Holst’s recommendation, by the young Adrian Boult. Although at its public premiere Holst experienced his first real success as a composer, he came to resent the popularity of The Planets, feeling that it overshadowed his other compositions and was not representative of his best music. His opera The Perfect Fool was presented at Covent Garden in 1923, and during that year and 1924 he wrote his Choral Symphony, which was first performed at the 1925 Leeds Festival. Holst’s teaching commitments made composition increasingly difficult for him, and the resulting conflict induced considerable personal stress. Matters came to a head at the end of 1923 when his doctor recommended that he cease all professional work and live in the country for a year, which he did throughout 1924, spending his time composing. On returning to London the following year he gave up all his teaching commitments except at St Paul’s.

The years that remained were to form the most creative phase of Holst’s career. The English spa town of Cheltenham presented a festival of his music in 1927, which he described as the most overwhelming musical event of his life; his evocative tone poem Egdon Heath was first performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra in 1928; and in the following year he was awarded the Howland Memorial Prize from Yale University for distinction in the arts. He was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal in 1930 and served as a visiting lecturer in composition at Harvard University in 1932, but on his return to England his health went into a serious decline, and he died two years later.

Holst was not a professionally trained conductor (his daughter Imogen remembered him walking around the room practising beating the difficult time signature of Mars from The Planets) but as a professional musician he appreciated what was required from the perspective of the orchestra. Although as a conductor of amateur performers he could achieve miracles, it was only in 1932, towards the very end of his life, that he felt able to write to a friend in relation to working with professional musicians, ‘At last I’m beginning to learn how to conduct my own things. It’s about time!’ He recorded The Planets twice, firstly using the acoustic method in 1923 and later in an electrical version in 1926, on both occasions with the London Symphony Orchestra. The former version, which was also his first experience of conducting a recording, was made under exceptionally trying conditions: after the thirteenth take of Venus in a cramped and hot studio the horn player collapsed. During the following year, 1924, Holst recorded two further works with the London Symphoy Orchestra, Two Songs Without Words and Beni Mora; and his St Paul’s Suite with an anonymous string orchestra. When these three works were reissued on a long playing record (Pearl GEM 126) in 1974, Imogen Holst wrote that they sounded ‘…very much as I remember them when he (Holst) conducted them at concerts in the Queen’s Hall fifty years ago’.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).