HOLST: Sāvitri / Arda Mandikian, sop (Sāvitri); Peter Pears, ten (Satyavān); Thomas Helmsley, bar (Death); English Opera Group Chorus & Orch.; Sir Charles Mackerras, cond / Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda (3rd group).* The Evening-Watch# / *Michael Jefferies, hp; #Pauline Stevens, mez & Ian Partridge, ten; Purcell Singers; Imogen Holst, cond / 4 Songs, H. 132 / Honor Sheppard, sop; Nona Liddell, vln / Hammersmith, H. 178 / BBC Symphony Orch.; Norman Del Mar, cond / The Perfect Fool: Ballet Suite / NBC Symphony Orch.; Malcolm Sargent, cond / The Planets / Boston Symphony Orch. & Women’s Chorus; Sir Adrian Boult, cond / SOMM Recordings ARIADNE 5030-2
In Great Britain, Gustav Holst had an enormous reputation during his lifetime and several of his works—not only The Planets, but also his songs, witty operas like At the Boar’s Head and his Buddhist and Christian religious pieces—continued to be performed on and off for decades, but in the United States it took quite a few years for even The Planets to take off, and audiences never quite warmed up to his other music because it was in a very different style. For the life of me, I never understood why even The Planets failed to generate sparks in U.S. concert halls for so long, since it is one of those very rare masterpieces that is both aurally attractive and a work of genius, but such was the case. Sir Adrian Boult’s 1961 stereo recording for EMI helped start the American interest in the piece, but it only became a sort-of staple here after William Steinberg’s 1970 recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Perhaps I was attracted to the more “British”-sounding works of Holst because I heard them for what they were and did not expect them to sound like The Planets, but in any case SOMM has given us here a wonderful 150th birthday tribute to this fine composer in historical performances by some very historical performers, including Peter Pears, Charles Mackerras, Norman Del Mar, Malcolm Sargent, Boult himself, and Holst’s daughter Imogen (don’t ask me why she doesn’t have an E at the end of her first name; I have no idea). In addition to championing and conducting her father’s music, Imogen acted for years as an assistant to Benjamin Britten, yet although she was certainly very capable in that position, many people don’t know that she wasn’t Britten’s first choice. He had really wanted the talented but oft-ignored composer Grace Williams to fill that position, but Williams demurred on the basis that she felt people would then assume her music was being performed only because she was Britten’s assistant.
I admit, however, not knowing anything of his personal life, thus I was moved and a bit saddened to read of all his struggles. As the son of a church organist and choirmaster who wasn’t paid very much (shades of J,S, Bach), money was always tight in the Holst household. Generations earlier, one of his forebears added “von” to the family name to jack it up a little in the hope of attracting superior music pupils, just as Alexander Zemlinsky, whose name often appears with the “von” in the middle, did to attract top-drawer commissions for his music, but Gustav was more down to earth and dropped the von in 1918, according to the notes, “when working with the YMCA and troops in Salonika.” But money was always in short supply for him, which caused him to overwork. Luckily, he did have a few affluent friends like Ralph Vaughan Williams who were happy to help him out now and then, but he, too was forced to take an organist-choirmaster job in the 1890s; he took it up cheerfully, feeling that working with a choir helped him write for such an ensemble. Physically weak and a lifelong asthma sufferer, Holst was rejected for the Army in World War I. He applied for a scholarship from the Royal College of Music but was turned down. By cutting down luxuries—which, he felt, included meat—and moonlighting as a trombonist, he managed to make do until the RCM finally did award him a scholarship in 1895, which is where he met Vaughan Williams.
In 1932 he came to America to teach at Harvard. Upon his arrival in New York, he was reunited with his brother Emil, a Broadway actor who also made films under the name Ernest Cossart. Sometime in late 1933 or early 1934 he was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer, which was removed by surgery, but his frail constitution did not allow him to recover properly. After returning to England, he died in May 1934, not yet 60 years old.
This retrospective album opens with a rare June 1956 broadcast of his 1908-09 chamber opera Sāvitri featuring the great tenor Peter Pears as Satyavān. I know any number of people, even in England, who absolutely detest Pears’ voice, yet although it was unusual in timbre I never had any problem with it and liked him on records for years before I heard him in person. Early on, the voice had a bit of “metal” in it—not a lot, but enough to draw comparisons with Italian tenor Tito Schipa—but by the late 1940s it had assumed its more familiar rounded, “plummy” sound without any hint of a metallic core. Nonetheless, it was a fluid voice—he could sing fast runs when called upon—and, more importantly, he was one of the finest interpreter of words in his time, which is one of the reasons why Igor Stravinsky used him to sing the title role in his 1951 German broadcast of Oedipus Rex. Hearing him at the Metropolitan Opera as Aschenbach in Britten’s Death in Venice, I was utterly shocked at the size of his voice, much, much larger than I had expected it to be. And he was also a riveting stage actor.
Although a pretty early work (1908-09), Sāvitri is one of the first of Holst’s works in which we can hear several elements of his mature style. The plot is simple: Sāvitri and Satyavān are happily married. Death comes to visit Sāvitri and tell her that he is coming to take Satyavān from her; she cannot bear this, and tells Death that she too will surely die if he does this, thus he will be killing two people, not one. Satyavān eventually talks Death out of it, and the pair live happily on. A pocket-sized plot, but then again, the opera is only 22 minutes long; but what exquisite and interesting music this is! The voice of death is heard in the distance at the outset, singing a cappella, then joined by Sāvitri in counterpoint, not standard duet form. When death leaves, she sings to soft strings, particularly a string bass interjection. When Satyavān sings of maya—illusion—his voice is set against the remote sound of a wordless female chorus. Their voices symbolize the divine world interacting with the mortal; they are heard again when Death reappears to claim Satyavān. By these means, Holst was able to create a mini-masterpiece; I think the only reason it is not performed much nowadays is due to its brevity, plus the fact that you’d be hard-pressed to find a companion opera to fill out the evening with.
Arda Mandikian (photo: Wikipedia, enhanced by AI)
Considering that this is the mid-1950s, shortly after Pears had his one and only severe vocal crisis, he is in surprisingly good voice, and baritone Thomas Helmsley is his typically excellent self. The singer I had never heard before was soprano Arda Mandikian, and she is terrific, possessor of a dark yet pungent and surprisingly powerful voice. Greek and Armenian by descent, Mandikian (1924-2009) made her stage debut at age 15 opposite Maria Callas. In 1948, she went to London to work with composer-musicologist Egon Wellesz, who had her sing ancient Greek songs as well as in his opera Incognita, which led to operatic roles in Great Britain, including Ellen Orford opposite Pears’ Peter Grimes at Covent Garden in 1953. She later became a star of the Greek National Opera, then its director in 1980. She died in 2009.
Put all this talent together under the wonderful direction of Charles Mackerras, and you have quite a powerful, gripping performance of this “pocket-sized” opera. And, as usual, SOMM’s remastering is of the highest quality, and I do mean highest. Not a trace of broadcast hiss or noise is to be heard on this recording, and both the voices and the orchestra sound perfectly natural. Although I’m sure that some of the interesting scoring effects are heard to better advantage in a stereo recording of this work, I’d be hard-put to think of a more dramatic reading. Only Mandikian’s sometimes unclear English diction mars this performance in any way. Yet the applause at the end was a disappointment: it sounded like no more than 25 or 30 people applauding, and they didn’t sound the least bit enthusiastic. Undoubtedly they were disappointed in the music because it didn’t sound like Puccini or Strauss.
The Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda are also very nice, if not as stunning as Sāvitri. The Purcell Singers do a good job under the direction of the composer’s daughter. The second of them, “Hymn to the Waters,” is in 6/8 and sounds the most like a good, rollicking British country tune, tidied up and made more classical by Holst. The 4 Songs for Soprano & Violin clearly show the influence of Vaughan Williams on Holst’s solo vocal writing, but they are fine pieces nonetheless, sung well by the little-known soprano Honor Sheppard. Interestingly, the violin accompaniment is not at all virtuosic, but rather consists mostly of long-held chords written in the middle of the instrument’s range; they could almost be played by a violist as well. Ian Partridge, who is anything but little-known, is in excellent voice singing The Evening Watch, a more impressionistic work than the Rig Veda hymns. In fact, I would rate this as one of Holst’s finest choral works, and in this performance the chorus practically glides across the bar lines in their sensitive yet sweeping delivery. Mezzo-soprano Pauline Stevens is pretty good—no more, but no less either.
The orchestral piece Hammersmith, which I had never heard before, was named after the town of Hammersmith; Holst met his future wife, Isobel Harrison, in the Hammersmith Socialist Club in 1901 and later taught music at St. Paul’s Girls’ School there. It opens with a moody, slow but smoldering theme played by the celli and basses, later moving into some quick, jolly yet quixotic music played by the winds (mostly flutes and clarinets) and brass. It’s a very interesting work and clearly had some influence on The Planets, which he also started writing there at about the same time. Norman Del Mar, a very fine and somewhat underrated conductor, does a good job with this piece, which is something of a stranger on records. I’ve only found five other recordings of it, including one each by Sir Adrian Boult and Richard Hickox. Much of the music is written in canon form.
Sir Malcolm Sargent’s excellent reading of the Perfect Fool suite is a good reminder that, although he himself only conducted a few modern classical works, music director Arturo Toscanini gave his guest conductors free rein in their choice of material, thus NBC audiences heard Mahler conducted by Bruno Walter, Scriabin conducted by Artur Rodziński, and Ghedini and Hindemith conducted by Guido Cantelli, among others. This one had to go to SOMM’s ace audio restoration engineer, Lani Spahr, and he did a near-miraculous job on it. Those of us familiar with the idiosyncrasies of NBC’s notoriously dead-sounding Studio 8-H are all too aware of the distortion its sound gave to an orchestra, and Spahr managed to overcome all of them but one, the peculiarly muddy-sounding low range which made string basses sound like muffled tubas. But the somewhat over-bright upper range—violins, trumpets, flutes, clarinets, etc.—have had their edginess somewhat normalized in Spahr’s remastering. And what a performance it is! Say what you want about the NBC Symphony, they were an orchestra of virtuosi. The problem was that, especially in the string section, they all played like concertmasters, which did not create an ideal section blend, but Toscanini and all of his highly talented guest conductors—not to mention Leopold Stokowski, who was the principal music director for a couple of years when Toscanini was mad at NBC for making his musicians play on other NBC programs when he wanted them for an extended rehearsal—eventually got them to coalesce. And just listen to those fast string passages, cellos as well as violins, for a perfect example of what I mean. This is truly breathtaking music-making, and this ballet suite is clearly one of the most imaginative and colorful pieces Holst ever wrote. Bravo to all concerned for rescuing this rare performance from oblivion!
And then we come to The Planets, Holst’s unquestioned masterpiece, conducted by the man who gave the world premiere, Adrian (later Sir Adrian) Boult. His several recordings of the suite are all famous, but this February 1946 live performance, made a year after what I feel was his best recording of it, is played by the Boston Symphony which, along with the Philadelphia Orchestra, was clearly among the most beautiful-sounding orchestras in the world at that time. It’s interesting to compare this performance with the 1945 studio recording, since all of the fast movements are played faster here and the slower ones slower than in the studio. This gives an extra edge to “Mars,” “Mercury,” “Jupiter” and “Uranus” as well as greater gravitas to “Venus,” “Saturn” and “Neptune.” One interesting feature of this performance is that, in the latter movement, the director of the chorus is none other than Arthur Fiedler, the man who led the Boston Pops Orchestra the longest, yet is almost forgotten nowadays.
Holst’s touching dedication of a score copy of “The Planets” to Adrian Boult
The brisker tempo of “Mars”—6:55 compared to 7:10 for the studio recording—is sort of a dual-edged sword. It makes the music sound more exciting, but somehow just misses the feeling of menace in the BBC Symphony recording. At least, that’s how I felt it, yet there is no question that this paragon among orchestras played it with stunning richness and power. And even though I usually feel that most other conductors take “Mercury” too slowly, I thought that Boult got it right on his 1945 recording (3:45) whereas in this performance it seemed a touch too fast at 3:28. But Boult, like his friend Toscanini, never conducted anything the exact same way twice, and on balance I would rate this performance as one of the finest I’ve ever heard. Also like Toscanini, Boult was a virtuoso conductor who always brought out the details of the inner voices with absolute precision, as he does here in both “Mercury” and “Jupiter.” The BSO’s music director at the time, Serge Koussevitzky, was a mediocre conductor (Ravel, Strauss and Stravinsky absolutely hated his performances of their music) but a first-rate builder of orchestras, and it shows in this warm yet glowing reading of Holst’s most famous score. Perhaps Boult lingered a bit longer over the slow movements because he, too, was basking in the almost unbelievable richness of sound this orchestra produced at that time. Surely, “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” has never sounded jollier, and these may well be Boult’s finest performances of “Saturn” and “Neptune.”
On balance, then, surely an interesting collection, and for the performances of Sāvitri, The Evening Watch, Hammersmith, The Perfect Fool ballet and The Planets, indispensable for any lover of Holst’s music.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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