Holst’s incidental music for The Coming of Christ has been rarely heard since its 1928 première at Canterbury Cathedral – only the opening fanfare and two choruses have been previously recorded. ... Holst’s music ... is magnificent. Composed for Canterbury’s resonant acoustic, its instrumental line-up of trumpet, strings, organ, piano and tubular bells sounds suitably archaic, yet the music, for all its modal colouring, avoids sounding like Carmina Burana. Most impressive are the choruses of the Heavenly Host, built on plain yet hauntingly affecting melodies, with occasional harmonic surprises adding piquancy to this fresh-sounding music. Hilary Davan Wetton, a long-term champion of Holst, conducts fervent performances of this and the accompanying works. His youthful singers include a fine soprano soloist, Marta Fontanals-Simmons, though her all-too-youthful male colleagues are underwhelming when compared to those featured in Davan Wetton’s previous Hyperion recording of the Psalms and Nunc Dimittis.

DANIEL JAFFÉ · JANUARY 2012

Inroads are gradually being made into the extensive amount of [Holst’s] music left in neglect and certainly unrecorded. ...Em Marshall-[Luck]’s EM Records label now brings his music for The Coming of Christ into the light. It has been heard in recent times but not recorded before.

[The Coming of Christ] arose from a 1927 commission by the Dean of Canterbury, Dr George Bell. He had in mind a mediaeval ‘mystery play’ for Canterbury Cathedral. As Em Marshall-Luck’s wonderful note reminds us, Dr Bell was a committed mediaevalist was also to commission T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral . The première duly took place in Canterbury Cathedral during Whitsun 1928. In Holst’s catalogue the music falls between the Shakespeare Falstaff opera-scene At the Boar’s Head, the ballet The Golden Goose, the dour symphonic poem Egdon Heath and the contemporaneous Moorside Suite (for brass band) and the dry muscle-play of the Concerto for Two Violins.

The Coming of Christ is a large-scale work using organ, piano, orchestra, choir, children’s choir and solo singers as well as, in this case, narrator. Here the speaking is done by one of England’s most celebrated actors, Robert Hardy, who is also a Vice-President of the English Music Festival. ...Hardy distils and magnifies every opportunity to characterise, from crustily defined regional accents with a wrinkle in the voice to brutal iron-ruthlessness for King Baltasar the Fierce to noble Shakespearean oration. This is not a case of speaking over or with the music. Music and speech are contained each in their own tracks. The 21 or so minutes of music are deployed across seven tracks ranging from 0.53 to 7.25. Tim Hawes’s clarion imperious trumpet plays a key role in tracks 6, 15 (adding an aureate descanting nimbus to the exultant singing) and 17 a final valedictory paraph. The First Song of the Host of Heaven was clearly fashioned around the glorious melody to which Holst set the words Bards of Passion and Mirth in the finale of the Keats-based First Choral Symphony. The Second Song includes a soprano solo that recalls an earlier part of the Choral Symphony: Beneath My Palm Trees. The swinging sanguine-positive The First and Second Songs of the Kings makes tactful use of the piano to underpin the men’s voices. The final surgingly plangent Song of the Coming of Christ has a grand symphonic carol feel to its unison weight. This is lent a seasonal glow by the judiciously chiming bells. Wonderful stuff and whetting the appetite for Cyril Rootham’s grand choral-orchestral Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. I hope that English Music Festival will appraise the Rootham and include it in their future plans.

The other items are sung with fine style and joyously splendid glow and blaze in a richly lively acoustic. ...This is a strong and indispensable entry in the English music revival and produced for the market with impressive speed and enviable quality.

rob barnett

We have to thank The English Music Festival of 2010 for resurrecting one of Holst’s most fascinating works, unheard since its 1927 premiere in Canterbury Cathedral.  The Coming of Christ, a recreation of medieval religious drama, was suggested by the Dean there, and the words came from John Masefield, Poet Laureate. Yet church elders thought the wrath of God would descend on a dramatic performance within sacred confines, so it was never heard again. And Holst’s daughter Imogen was po-facedly dismissive of it.

This recording, set down in Holst’s own St Paul’s Girls’ School, Brook Green, brings all the immediacy of this Nativity of such clean clarity (the Cathedral acoustic permitted nothing else). Hilary Davan Wetton conducts, the City of London Choir’s diction is immaculate, the Holst Orchestra responds empathetically, and veteran actor Robert Hardy nuances Masefield’s lines in a variety of regional accents and mood-modulations.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY · 15 DECEMBER 2011

This latest release from EM Records must break some kind of record because the date of recording is quite correct: the sessions for this disc took place in mid-October 2011 and I’m typing this review exactly one month to the day later. Thanks to speedy production work here is the finished article, just in time to be a welcome addition to the Christmas stocking of any self-respecting lover of English music. And let me make it clear straightaway that there is nothing about this release that feels rushed. The recordings themselves are very good and there’s an excellent booklet.

So, if our hypothetical English music-lover does unwrap this CD on Christmas morning, what will he or she get? Well, principally they’ll get the chance to hear a most interesting work by Holst which has lain in obscurity for some eighty years.

Briefly, the background, as related in Em Marshall-Luck’s admirable booklet note, is that in 1927 Holst was asked by Dr. George Bell, then the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, to participate in a novel project. Bell wanted to revive the medieval practice of enacting Mystery Plays in churches and wished to put on such a play in the nave at Canterbury. The poet, John Masefield, was asked to write the text with Holst to provide the music. The result was a narration interspersed with seven musical numbers – “seven simple but effective and tuneful songs”, as Em Marshall-Luck accurately describes the score. The Coming of Christ was duly performed in Canterbury Cathedral at Whitsun 1928 before substantial audiences but seems to have fallen into complete neglect thereafter – it receives but a passing mention in Imogen Holst’s 1974 book on her father. It was revived for a first modern performance at The English Music Festival in May 2010. This was followed by a London performance in November 2010, given by largely the same forces that perform on this recording – there was a different reciter at the London performance.

The musical forces required comprise SATB chorus – though quite a bit of the music is for unison voices – with an accompaniment of strings, organ, piano, trumpet and, in the last movement, tubular bells. The music is, for the most part, quite straightforward though the third and sixth numbers are more elaborate, and it seems to me that though folk tunes may not be used - I’m unsure on this point – the melodies have a directness of expression that marks them out as, if not folk-influenced, certainly music of the people. Interestingly, Holst’s pupils from Morley College, as well as from St. Paul’s Girls’ School, took part in the Canterbury performance and Imogen Holst speaks of this as “the Morleyite’s most ambitious effort.” The style of the music is economical – in fact, there’s not a wasted note – and the accompaniment is often quite spare.

It seems as if Holst wanted his music to speak easily and directly to a mass and possibly musically unsophisticated audience. So, for example, the first musical number, ‘First Song of the Host of Heaven’ is largely for unison voices; it’s only in the third and final stanza that fairly straightforward SATB harmony is adopted. The next piece, ‘Song of the Four Angels’ is similarly uncomplicated, requiring just four male voices. It’s in the third piece, ‘Second Song of the Host of Heaven’ that the music becomes more involved and more dramatic. However, in the very next piece, ‘First Song of the Kings’ heard attacca here, Holst reverts to straightforward writing for unison male voices, accompanied by piano and the same forces deliver the ‘Second Song of the Kings’, a swinging little march, which recurs later in the work.

The most elaborate movement by far – and the longest – is the ‘Antiphonal’, which follows the Angel’s announcement of the birth of Christ to the shepherds. In this piece the musical writing is much more varied, the harmonic language is more complex than elsewhere in the piece and the instrumental scoring is at its fullest – only the bells are not heard. The bells are reserved for the concluding number, ‘The Song of the Coming of Christ’, and Holst uses the bells most effectively. This final piece is a strophic hymn of praise. The melody is a solid tune, very English in character and very reassuring. With the bells adorning the texture it makes a joyful ending and one suspects that an audience or congregation could easily pick up the tune and join in.

Interestingly, though Holst’s music is relatively straightforward, the same cannot be said of Masefield’s words, which are much more elaborate at times. I wonder how easy the Canterbury audiences may have found it to follow the words. The spoken words are not provided in the booklet and for all Robert Hardy’s skills – of which more in a moment – I didn’t find it easy to grasp them all first time round. That shouldn’t be taken as a criticism: to my ears the words seem to convey rather well the style and literary ambience of a medieval Mystery Play. For this recording the spoken text has been reduced – by about half, I believe – by Em Marshall-Luck. Without access to the full text I can’t judge what has been omitted but it seems to me that what we hear coheres well and it certainly dovetails with the musical numbers. There’s about 15 minutes of speech in this performance.

The success of the spoken element is a tribute to Robert Hardy. Sometimes in the past I’ve found his style of delivery a bit florid and overdone. That’s emphatically not the case here. It’s hugely beneficial to have an actor involved who is very experienced in radio acting for Hardy understands firstly how to use a microphone and secondly how to colour the words so as to paint an aural picture for the listeners. Thus he’s very successful in the first stretch of speech, where Masefield’s text is particularly image-rich; Hardy puts over the words, which aren’t easy to grasp, very well, leading the listener on and skilfully using the pace and tone of his delivery. He’s masterly in the passage where he assumes the characters of the three kings – ‘Balthazar the Fierce’, ‘Gaspar the Wealthy’ and ‘Melchior who seeks below the pit, above the peak to find what is beyond what it seems’. Finally, he’s also excellent in depicting the shepherds with suitably – but not overdone – rustic and Celtic accents. Incidentally, listeners may be disconcerted, as I was, that Masefield introduces the kings before the shepherds, which is the reverse of the order in which they appear in the Gospels but I suppose there’s logic in this in that the kings came from afar and, therefore, had to set off a long time before the birth of Christ.

I couldn’t honestly say that a masterpiece has been unearthed here but The Coming of Christ most certainly did not deserve its decades of neglect and it’s very well worth hearing. It’s given a dedicated performance under the direction of Hilary Davan Wetton, who has made several fine Holst recordings in the past. The accompaniment is well played though I’d have like to hear a bit more of the organ part. The choir does well, though it’s a bit top heavy at times – the tenors and basses sound rather youthful and a bit more vocal weight in those sections might have produced a more consistently balanced choral sound.

Four shorter choral pieces complete the programme. There’s a good, fresh account of the fine Nunc Dimittis and the same can be said of I love my Love. This is a setting for unaccompanied choir taken from Six Choral Folksongs. Holst uses a tune collected in Cornwall and what a lovely, expressive melody it is. The Two Psalms for chorus, strings and organ are well known, and rightly so. Here again I felt there wasn’t always quite enough depth of tone in the men’s voices – and the tenor soloist in Psalm 86, heard also briefly in The Coming of Christ, is pallid, I’m afraid – also the organ doesn’t register as well as one would like ideally. But Mr Davan Wetton and his musicians are committed advocates for these pieces as, indeed, they are throughout the programme.

How fitting that the recording should have been made in the school where Holst taught for so many years and that it should have involved the present day members of the very choir that he directed and that took part in the first performance of The Coming of Christ. The English Music Festival was very enterprising in reviving this work in 2010 and EM Records are to be congratulated in making the piece available now to a much wider audience through this disc, which it is a pleasure to commend to all admirers of Holst in particular and of English music in general.

JOHN QUINN