COMPANY: Somm Recordings
CATEGORY: CD
COMPOSER: Gustav Holst

Product: 758871504027

Out of stock

This album is a further installment in the series celebrating the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst's birth. Following never-before-released live recordings from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, issued in careful restorations, this installment includes "Beni Mora" from 1956 and a live BBC broadcast of the "Choral Symphony" from 1964, both conducted by one of the most important conductors of his time and a specialist in the British repertoire, Sir Malcolm
Sargent, and played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Holst's "The Planets" is a justly famous suite, but the great originality and skill of his writing is still largely underestimated. During a stay in Algiers in 1908, Holst overheard a local musician playing the same phrase over and over again on a bamboo flute for two hours. This melody became the basis for the final movement of "Beni Mora", in which Holst repeats the eight-note melody 163 times, thereby
repeated 163 times, thus anticipating minimalism. After the success of "The Planets", Holst received a commission from the Leeds Triennial Festival in 1925 and revised the draft of his "Choral Symphony" for it - he was inspired by a collection of poems by John Keats.