Holst: The Planets

This is a digital recording, released on Deutsche Grammophon in 1983, and originally released in 1981.

## Details

Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

**The Planets** op. 32

1. **Mars, the Bringer of War** - Allegro - 7:14
2. **Venus, the Bringer of Peace** - Adagio - Andante - Animato - Tempo I - 8:34
3. **Mercury, the Winged Messenger** - Vivace - 4:11
4. **Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity** - Allegro giocoso - Andante maestoso - Tempo I - Maestoso - Lento maestoso - Presto - 7:27
5. **Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age** - Adagio - Andante - 9:20
6. **Uranus, the Magician** - Allegro - Lento - Allegro - Largo - 5:59
7. **Neptune, the Mystic** - Andante - Allegretto - 8:41

Total length: 52 minutes

* Orchestra: Berliner Philharmoniker
* Chorus: RIAS Chamber Choir (Track 7)
* Chorus Master: Uwe Gronostay
* Conductor: Herbert von Karajan

Recorded: Berlin, Germany, 1/1981

Catalogue Numbers:

* CD: 400 028-2
* LP: 2532 019
* Cassette: 3302 019

## Liner Notes

*The Planets* occupies a place in Holst's output similar to that of *The Rite of Spring* in Stravinsky's. Each piece is based on a simple, elemental extra-musical idea. Each has achieved such widespread popularity - *The Planets* almost from the start, *The Rite* more gradually - as to eclipse many of its composer's other no less deserving works. Each (although drafted in a practical version for two pianists) is scored for a massive orchestra, used not only for the power of its combined forces but also as an apparently limitless palette of tone-colours. Each marks the furthest point to which its composer took his particular brand of late-romantic musical language before making a fresh start on a more austere path. And each, while including some stylistic backward glances, also contains the seeds of its composer's future development.

Holst began work on *The Planets*, in fact, in the spring of 1914, only a year after the première in Paris of *The Rite of Spring*; he completed the orchestration in 1917. He would not have heard *The Rite* by then, but he did know other works by Stravinsky; and he had also been impressed, his daughter Imogen tells us in her study of his music, by Schoenberg's *Five Orchestral Pieces*, first performance under Sir Henry Wood in London in 1912. These avant-garde influences had been absorbed into an idiom rooted in Wagner but then profoundly affected by plainsong, 16th-century polyphony and above all the revelatory discovery, in the early years of the century, of the riches of English folk song.

Another important influence on Holst's music was his interest in Eastern philosophy; and this led him, with some prompting from his friend the writer Clifford Bax, to the study of the ancient craft of astrology. There is no doubt that he took it seriously, and Bax wrote that 'he became a skilled reader of horoscopes'. But a sentence from a letter written in 1914, quoted by Imogen Holst, is significant: 'As a rule', he wrote, 'I only study things that suggest music to me.' The principal importance of astrology to Holst was that the astrological idea of the different qualities bestowed by the different planets suggested to him, at a time when he was finding large-scale composition difficult, a scheme for an extended orchestral suite.

The suite is shaped to provide maximum contrast between adjacent movements and a satisfying, though unconventional, overall progression. *Mars* and *Venus* are a complementary pair in astrology as in classical mythology: strangely enough, Holst's terrifying vision of warfare, with its relentless 5/4 and 5/2 rhythms and his consoling vision of peace were composed respectively before and after the outbreak of the First World War. *Mercury* and *Jupiter* are an equally well contrasted pair of scherzos: *Mercury*, the last movement to be written, superimposes different keys and metres and employs kaleidoscopic orchestral colouring to suggest quicksilver speed of thought; *Jupiter*, the most conservative movement and the most obviously English, is deliberately heavy-footed ad down-to-earth. *Saturn*, Holst's favourite among the seven, presents identifiably human reactions to the inexorable onset of old age. *Uranus* is more like a portrayal of an individual character, an eccentric and bumbling old magician who nevertheless in the end brings off one successful spell. this moment of magic prepares the way for *Neptune*, which, with its floating 5/4 time and its hidden choir of women's voices, transcends individual characters and human emotions to end *The Planets* in mystical contemplation of infinite time and space.

*Anthony Burton*

## Links

For the playlist of the album, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UfpgT9FMAk&list=PLp851k0WgI2k8vyO98G8dDW29G4LE\_Z9j

For more details on the album, click here: https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/holst-the-planets-karajan-9968

For the official Deutsche Grammophon website, click here: https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en