Imogen HOLST (1907 – 1984)Mass in A minor (1927) [20:36]
A Hymne to Christ (1940) [2:24]
Three Psalms (1943)a [16:07]
Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow (1950)b [9:19]
Hallo my fancy, whither wilt thou go? (1972) [6:25]
Benjamin BRITTEN (1913 – 1976)
Rejoice in the Lamb Op.30 (1943, orch. I. Holst 1952)a [15:46]
Choir of Clare College, Cambridge; Tanya Houghton (harp)b; The Dmitri Ensemblea; Graham Ross
rec. All Hallows’ Church, Gospel Oak, London, July 2011
HARMONIA MUNDI HMU 907576 [72:35]
Justice, when it finally arrives, can feel almost accidental. Imogen Holst spent decades in service — to her father’s legacy, to Britten’s relentless creative demands at Aldeburgh, to the institutional life of British music — and the world took her at her own modest self-valuation. A handmaiden. An amanuensis. The daughter of. It is only now, through a handful of recordings gathered over the past generation, that listeners are beginning to understand what that service cost, and what it quietly concealed.
The choral music collected here makes the case more forcefully than anything previously released.
Start with the Mass in A minor, composed while Holst was still a student at the Royal College of Music under Vaughan Williams. The obvious comparison is RVW’s own Mass in G minor — that luminous, modal masterpiece from 1921 — and yes, you can hear the lineage. The open fifths, the modal inflections, a certain gravity in the part-writing. But to call it imitative is to miss what is genuinely startling: a confidence in the handling of vocal texture that most composers take a decade past student work to acquire. The soprano line in particular has a long, arching quality — not borrowed from anyone — and the harmonic movement, even when it defers to its model, carries its own emotional logic. This music has lain unheard for decades. That is simply scandalous.
“A Hymne to Christ” sets two verses from Donne’s great storm-poem — In what torn ship soever I embark — and the deceptive simplicity of the piece is itself a kind of argument. Holst does not reach for the dramatic. She finds something almost liturgical in Donne’s metaphysical conceits, and the voice-writing is impeccably clean, each entry placed where the ear least expects and most needs it. You might hear Finzi here, just briefly — that same English pastoral restraint, that same reluctance to force the emotional temperature. But the resemblance is superficial. The piece stands entirely on its own.
The Three Psalms of 1943 are another matter altogether.
Here Holst moves into genuinely harder territory — harmonically tense, rhythmically unyielding, with a string orchestra deployed not as cushion but as counterforce. The austerity is deliberate and earned. If the earlier pieces still breathe the milder air of interwar English music, the Three Psalms feel like a wartime document, something written with the windows shut against the noise outside. The harmonic language recalls Gustav Holst in his late period — the gaunt late chamber music, the Egdon Heath world — though Imogen’s idiom is her own. The strings are used sparingly throughout, entering at moments of structural stress rather than as continuous accompaniment, and the effect is genuinely unsettling. This is the most forward-looking music in the collection, the piece that most insistently demands a second hearing.
Then, almost as deliberate relief, comes “Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow” — Keats texts, female voices, harp — written at Britten’s suggestion and first heard at Aldeburgh. The contrast with the Three Psalms is so complete it almost feels like provocation. The harp writing is idiomatic without being showy, the vocal lines luminous and unforced. Britten had a genius for knowing what a composer needed to write next, and here he was right.
What this album establishes, cumulatively and beyond reasonable argument, is that Imogen Holst was not a minor figure who occasionally wandered into composition. She was a serious, technically accomplished composer with a genuine voice — modal but not archaic, austere but not cold, formally disciplined without rigidity. The neglect is understandable, given the life she chose to lead. It is not forgivable. Get this disc.
