A memorable & touching portrait of an oft-misunderstood composer: words & music by Gustav Holst at the London Song Festival

Gustav Holst by Herbert Lambert, bromide print, 1921 NPG P109 © National Portrait Gallery, London

The songs of Gustav Holst: Katie Bray, Ruairi Bowen, Nigel Foster; London Song Festival at Hinde Street Methodist Church
Reviewed 29 November 2024

A portrait of Gustav Holst in words and music, interleaving his varied, fascinating and sometimes experimental songs with the his own words to create a vivid picture

The London Song Festival continued its exploration of the Class of 1874 at Hinde Street Methodist Church on Friday 29 November 2024 when the festival’s artistic director, pianist Nigel Foster, was joined by mezzo-soprano Katie Bray, tenor Ruairi Bowen and speaker Martin Handley for a programme exploring Gustav Holst’s life and songs. 25 of the composer’s songs were interleaved with readings by Martin Handley, drawing on Holst’s letter and lecture notes, and Imogen Holst’s biography of her Father.

Holst was a fascinating and intriguing man, with strong views of the importance of music in society, and his own words were frequently punchy and trenchant, yet engaging. His description of one of his early Thaxted Festivals with the music making seeming to explode around the town for 14 hours a day, often spontaneously, demonstrated the way he was able to inspire those he taught to go beyond themselves. One of the memorable quotes from his own words ‘Music has the power to bring people together’.

There was an experimental edge to some of his later music, and he was constantly questing, rarely writing the same thing twice. He does not seem to have had a ‘habit of songs’ in the way that his friend and Ralph Vaughan Williams had. Though the voice was important to Holst, there is a space of nearly 20 years when Holst virtually stopped writing for voice and piano at all; there is little major between his Hymns from the Rig Veda of 1908 and the Humbert Wolfe settings of 1929, though there are a group of songs for soprano or tenor and violin. 

Music for Holst was a serious business, and he never put humour in it, nor was he interested in sentimentality. Few of the songs we heard had the sort of emotional intensity that we get from his finest orchestral music.

The concert presented us with a wide selection, arranged by theme rather than date. We had songs from Holst’s student days, including his Four Songs, Op 4 from 1896/8, works written under Charles Villiers Stanford’s watchful eye and which do not always shake of the influence of the well-made Victorian song. Works from his early mature period, including the Six Songs, Op.16 from 1903/4, and works from his Indian period, the Hymns from the Rig Veda, Op. 24 from 1908. And threading their way through the evening were songs from Twelve Humbert Wolfe Songs, Op 48 from 1929.

The Humbert Wolfe settings were all performed by Ruairi Bowen, they are not a strict cycle but intended as a collection. I have to admit that Wolfe’s poetry is of a style that makes me wonder why anyone wanted to set it. The songs are all large-scale and complex, and in them you sensed the mature Holst  (who had written Egdon Heath and the Moorside Suite in the previous years) experimenting with what song was. The Floral Bandit was fast and ardent with a sense of narrative, whilst Things Lovelier was spare with almost no piano, the harmonies of the voice part seeming to wander wildly, the piano contributions giving it an unearthly feel. Challenging for the singer, the music was far less singer-friendly than RVW’s work, and you felt Holst pushing towards something, the idea what a song really was. Again, The Dream City had this sense of wandering harmonies, turning the song into fluid arioso that followed the rather meandering verse. Rhyme was engagingly perky but was never content to settle and I found intriguing pre-pre-echoes of Walton’s ‘Rhyme’ from A Song from the Lord Mayor’s Table from 1962! 

Journey’s End was perhaps the most powerful of the Humbert Wolfe settings, with Holst going into emotionally intense territory that he did not always visit explicitly. Sung as a duet, it was a dialogue between mother and son as he questions her about the after-life and she gives bleak, intense answers. There was no heavenly city here, and all three performers made the song into a dark, powerful and austere masterpiece. The final song of the evening was the strange Betelgeuse, again the vocal line wandered to suit Wolfe’s poetry but it was placed against an atmospheric, mystic piano part that seemed to have come out of The Planets!

We heard three of Holst’s settings of hymns from the Rig Veda, in his own translations, and I would love to have heard more. Ushas (Dawn) was a passionate arioso over a supporting piano that veered towards the mystic, all sung by Katie Bray with passionate intensity. By contrast, Song of The Frogs, sung as a duet was a vividly characterful, chattering song that was almost a children’s farmyard song, yet highly serious. By contrast again, Ratri (Night) was calmly rhapsodic, sung with wonderful control by Katie Bray, over a quite dense accompaniment.

Holst’s Opus 16 songs, from 1903/4 are a varied mix, again a collection rather than a cycle. Cradle Song, setting Blake, was surprisingly perky with Katie Bray really putting the words over, whilst Calm is the morn was interestingly rhapsodic with Katie Bray presenting the middle section with passionate intensity. In Peace, Bray’s vocal line seemed to be almost independent of the piano, the two complementing each other to create a serious, thoughtful piece.

There were occasional songs. The most intriguing was the unaccompanied duet that Holst wrote in 1933 for the Adrian Boult’s wedding; an unaccompanied piece, a Marlowe setting, Come live with me and be my love, that was a rather serious, surprisingly austere piece of two part contrapuntal writing. The Heart Worships from 1907 was intriguingly RVW-adjacent, the piano part seeming to evoke RVW but Katie Bray brought a feeling of centredness, of gravity to the vocal intonations. Song of the Woods from 1903 was a vigorous pastoral, though Ruairi Bowen and Nigel Foster could not quite disguise the fact that it rather went on a bit.

Of the early songs, the Four Songs of 1898 were given an opus number. Spring’s Message was rather considered, Katie Bray making a real case for Holst’s care for the poetry, whereas Awake my heart was presented with urgent passion by Bray and Foster. Apart from these we had eight songs from the 1890s and 1900, these seemed to be well-made songs, attentive to the verse and the poetry; all ardently sung by Bowen and Bray, they rarely seemed to be able to push away from their Victorian models. 

Few of Holst’s songs were loveable or memorable in the way that some of RVW’s are, yet you could sense the composer constantly questing and experimenting, challenging us to think about what a song really was. And combined with his own words, they created a memorable and touching portrait of an oft-misunderstood composer.