Holst: I Vow to Thee, My Country – Vann

Nobody thinks of Holst as a church composer, and there are reasons for that — most of them having to do with “The Planets” swallowing his reputation whole, the way a large moon eclipses a small planet. But he grew up around church music, taught at St. Paul‘s Girls’ School where the acoustics of the chapel shaped his ear for decades, and never quite left liturgical composition alone even as his imagination roamed off toward Sanskrit hymns and Somerset folksong and the eerie orchestral machinery of Neptune. This new SOMM release, recorded in 2021 at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square — a barn of a Victorian building with a decay time that flatters choral tone without smearing consonants entirely — wants to make the case that the sacred music adds up to something. Mostly, it does.

William Vann leads the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, a body of singers I confess I did not know well before this disc arrived, and they turn out to be first-rate: blended, unforced, capable of the kind of soft-grained pianissimo that doesn’t curdle into breathiness. Joshua Ryan’s organ playing has color and tact. Richard Horne’s bells — tubular and bass — show up at exactly the moments where Holst wanted a touch of otherworldliness, a reminder that this is the same composer who could make an orchestra sound like it was transmitting from beyond the atmosphere.

Start with the Nunc Dimittis, because everyone else does. Richard Terry commissioned it for Westminster Cathedral, and Holst — never a man in a hurry to publish anything, notoriously indifferent to his own back catalogue — let it sit unheard for years until his daughter Imogen brought out an edition in 1979. It sets the Latin Compline text, not the Anglican canticle you’d expect from the title, and there’s a kind of severe, chant-inflected beauty to it that this choir handles with real poise — the men firm without barking, the trebles (well, here, the altos and sopranos of a mixed choir) floating the close in a way that made me sit back in my chair. It has been recorded plenty of times before — Hyperion’s various Advent and Evensong compilations, to name one lineage — but this account holds its own.

The Two Psalms are the real discovery for anyone who doesn’t already own a recording by the Finzi Singers or one of the cathedral choirs that has dabbled in this repertoire. Written in 1912, premiered eight years later at, of all places, a football ground in Newcastle — St. James’ Park, no less, a detail that tells you something about English communal music-making between the wars, band concerts and hymn festivals filling stadiums the way league matches do now. Psalm 86, “To My Humble Supplication,” is inward, almost confiding; the soprano and tenor soloists here sing with an unforced sincerity that avoids the trap of oversolemnity. Then Psalm 148 arrives — “Lord, Who Hast Made Us for Thine Own,” a text by Frances Ralph Gray rather than a literal psalm translation — and the choir opens up, the organ underneath thickening into something almost symphonic. Vann paces the crescendo shrewdly; he doesn’t rush the climax, lets it arrive.

Iain Farrington’s arrangement of the Short Festival Te Deum, originally scored for orchestra and dashed off for use at Morley College where Holst taught composition classes to adult students by day and presumably dreamed of Mars by night, clocks in at something like four and a half minutes — brisk to the point of curtness, using the Book of Common Prayer text with almost no fuss. It is not major Holst. It is useful Holst, music built for actual liturgical labor rather than the concert hall, and Farrington’s reduction for choir and organ serves it without pretending it’s more than it is.

The hymn tunes scattered through the program are a mixed bag, as hymn tunes by major composers so often are — think of how unevenly Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Praise contributions have aged. “In This World, the Isle of Dreams,” a Robert Herrick setting, has genuine melodic charm, strophic and unpretentious. “Gird on Thy Sword,” pulled from the anthem “Man Born to Toil,” works better in its original context, I suspect, than as a freestanding tune. “Our Blest Redeemer,” written for the Public Schools Hymn Book, is — there’s no kind way to put this — dreich, a tune that trudges rather than sings, the kind of thing that gives Edwardian hymnody its reputation for worthy dullness.

Is this really the first complete album of Holst’s sacred choral output, as the annotation claims? I’d want to see a fuller discography before signing off on that. Notably missing are “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “O Valiant Hearts,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” several carols — pieces that surely count as sacred choral music by any reasonable definition, whatever their popularity has done to their critical standing. So “complete” needs an asterisk. But the claim of completeness matters less than the quality of what’s actually here, and on that count Vann and his singers have done real service — patient, intelligent advocacy for a corner of Holst’s output that concertgoers rarely encounter and record collections have historically shortchanged. Not a disc for one sitting; better taken in small doses, like Compline itself. Recommended, with the caveat firmly attached.