This monumental recording blends
the skills. of two superb orchestralcolorists, the composer Gustav Holst
(1874-1934) and conductor Leopold
Stokowski (b. 1882), in a classic per-
formance that is an acknowledged
sonic showpiece.
Wrote Lawrence Gilman of Holst:
‘‘He was a gifted artist, a gifted
teacher; a man of flexible and capa-
cious imagination, a wit, a poet, a
mystic. He was on familiar terms with
the cosmos.” And Louis Biancolli ex-
plained the stimulus for The Planets
(in “The Concert Companion”; Whitt-
lesey House;- New York, 1947): “A
man of multiple interests and fabu-
lous learning, Gustav Holst found in-
Spiration for his music in the vast
realm of nature and history ...One
day he looked into the skies and felt
music surge in him as he sought the
meaning of the stars.”
An Englishman of Swedish and En-
glish descent, Holst was born into a
musical family and trained to music
from boyhood. At 12 he was already
studying Berlioz’s treatise on orches-
MANUFACTURED BY CAPITOL RECORDS, INC., A SUBSIDIARY OF CAPITOL INDUSTRIES, INC., HOLLYWOOD AND VINE STREETS, HOLLYWOOD. CALIFORNIA, FACTORIES: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, JAC
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SERAPHIM
“Angels of the highest order”
tration. When he went to London to
study at the Royal College, he came
under Wagner’s spell. Later influences
upon him were Bach and Purcell
Grieg and Richard Strauss. It had
been his intention to become a pian-
ist, but neuritis of the hand obliged
him to give up the keyboard and he
became a trombonist instead. The ex-
perience of orchestral discipline and
orchestral playing account in part for
the extraordinary virtuosity and prac-
ticality of his scoring. With his close
friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, he
shared a passionate interest in folk
poetry and folk music. After 1903,
he gave up orchestral playing to de-
vote himself fully to composing and
to teaching.
Throughout his lifetime, Leopold
Stokowski has been a perennially,
phenomenally vital creative force in
music. Not even nine decades have
chipped away at his genius. English-
born of Polish and irish stock, and an
American citizen since 1915, Stokow-
ski studied in London and at the Paris
Conservatory. From 1905 to 1908, he
was organist and choirmaster of St.
Bartholomew’s Church in New York
City. He made his debut in 1909 as
conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony
Orchestra. His tenure as conductor of
the Philadelphia Symphony (1912-
36) is legendary: “Among the great-
est and most revealing it has ever
been our privilege to hear,” critic
David Hall has called some of the
Stokowski-Philadelphia performances
of those days.
Always restlessly seeking new per-
Spectives from which to view great
works of music, Stokowski’s demand
for perfection has driven him to ex-
periment with the seating of the or-
chestra, to orchestrate works by
Bach, and to labor for better results
in the methods of reproducing music
on both film and records. His collab-
oration with the Disney Studios on
“Fantasia” (1940) is one of the un-
diminishing delights of the cinema,
with proven power to enchant each
new generation afresh. Though his
most controversial readings have
Caused purists to gnash their teeth
with rage, even purists concede that
no other conductor has done more to
imbue classical music with excite-
ment in our century.
When Stokowski’s. performance. of
Holst’s Planets was initially released,
David Johnson wrote in High Fidelity:
“As an essay in orchestral sound, the
Planets is still capable of casting its
spell. The huge orchestra is deployed
with a clarity and simplicity that is in
itself a kind of genius .. .. This disc
iS aS near perfect a job of conducting
as Can well be imagined: listen to the
immaculate unison passages for the
entire string body, the perfectly
matched dialogue of solo violin and
solo oboe (‘Mercury’), the wonderful
precision of harp and celesta arpeg-
gios, the weight and balance of the
open fifths in the brasses (‘Saturn’),
the weird harp harmonics. There is
not a careless nor an ill-considered
measure in the entire performance.
The engineers have caught the spirit
and given the record a perfect setting, —
capable of mirroring the slightest nu-
ances and of doing justice to the big-
~ gest climaxes. By far the best Planets
available.”
The Planets, composed between 1914 and
1916, is a suite of seven movements.
Holst’s starting point for the music was the
astrological character of each planet,
though his daughter has written that once
the underlying idea had been formulated
“he let the music have its way with him.’
There is therefore no program for the suite,
and the composer himself pointed out that
it has no connection with the deities of
classical mythology. The only clues to the
meaning of the music are the subtitles of
the individual movements.
SIDE ONE
(26:09)
MARS, THE BRINGER OF WAR
(Band 1; 6:33)
Three musical ideas are used to create this
martial piece: (1) a brutally rhythmic fig-
ure of five beats relentlessly hammered
out; (2) a principal theme in triads moving
by chromatic steps with no true harmonic
purpose; (3) a second theme consisting of
a tattoo in the tenor tuba answered by a
flourish of trumpets. There is no glory, no
heroism, no tragedy in this music. War as
a senseless, mechanized horror is Holst’s
real subject here.
VENUS,
THE BRINGER OF PEACE
(Band 2; 8:01)
She is announced by four ascending notes
in the solo horn and a sequence of con-
verging chords in the flutes and oboes.
Most of her music lies, symbolically, in the
middle and upper registers of the instru-
ments, and harps, celeste, and glocken-
spiel further characterize her heavenly na-
ture. There are also beautiful melodies in
the solo violin and oboe. Though this is
music of Surpassing serenity, it is not sim-
ple in harmony, texture or orchestral son-
ority. One cannot help observe how fitting
it is that the state of peace be described in
complex terms, in contrast to the simplic-
ity of the depiction of war.
MERCURY,
THE WINGED MESSENGER
(Band 3; 4:00)
This is the shortest movement of the suite.
Apart from its speed, however, its particu-
lar quality comes from the opposition of
two simultaneous keys and two simultane-
ous rhythms. The keys, sounded in the very
first bar, are B-flat and E (which, being
separated from one another by the interval
of the tritone, have no note in common).
The two rhythms arise out of different
groupings of six beats, the first being ONE-
two-three-FOUR-five-six, the second being
ONE-two-THREE-four-FIVE-six. This opposi-
tion of contrasting patterns is one of Holst’s
principal characteristics, and other exam-
ples of it can be found not only in the Plan-
ets but abundantly throughout his other
+ works.
JUPLEER,
_THE BRINGER OF JOLLITY
(Band 4; 7:35)
The exuberance here is manifested not
only in tempo and rhythm but also in the
multiplicity of subjects. One can count
four, five, or six of them, depending on
whether one divides the first two into their
component parts—they do behave like in-
dependent themes. ‘‘Jupiter’’ might well be
designated as ‘‘the English movement,’’ be-
cause it shows how profoundly Holst was
influenced by his country’s folk music.
This is rustic English music, music for a
fair. There are crowds of people in it and
infinite good spirits. The grand tune: that
- ends the parade of themes has become the
setting for a patriotic hymn with the words,
“| vow to thee, my country.”
S-60175
STEREO
Sean eee
SIDE TWO
(20:05)
SATURN,
THE BRINGER OF OLD AGE
(Band 1; 7:50)
Unlike the previous movements, which are
static in the sense that each depicts vari-
ous aspects of a single trait, this one moves
through a series of ‘“‘events’’ that bring the
music to conclusions not envisioned at the
beginning. There is a profound hollowness
and sense of defeat in the harmony of the
opening chords, and an even deeper des-
pair in the motif sounded beneath them by
the double basses. But the elderly voice of
wisdom is soon heard in the B-minor theme
for the trombones, and at the end the
mood is one of acceptance, reconciliation,
and consequent serenity.
URANUS, THE MAGICIAN
(Band:2° 5:45)
You can take as the figure of Uranus al-
most any magician who has ever appeared
in the opera, drama, or vaudeville — pref-
erably one with the tall pointed hat studded
with stars, the flowing blue robe with volu-
minous sleeves, and the silver wand. He is
invoked by Holst with a triple invocation,
and he begins to show his tricks immedi-
ately. His repertoire is vast and astonish-
ing and at the climax of his demonstration
he struts around pompously to a pompous
tune. By way of encore, he makes some
mysterious incantations, suddenly (one
guesses from the music) envelops himself
in flames—and disappears!
NEPTUNE, THE MYSHIC
(Band 3; 6:30)
This movement is, if any music can be, the
disembodied spirit of sound. Themes are
practically nonexistent; in their place are
fragments of melody and harmony, all
manipulated at the very lowest dynamic
level and in the most attenuated orches-
tral sonorities. Almost imperceptibly a
double chorus of women’s voices enters on
a high G, sustained through a dozen bars.
The singing continues, without words, em-
bedded in a diaphanous veil of orchestral
sound. Even this dies away, and the voices
are left alone to intone a cadence over and
over again with ever diminishing tone, un-
til it is consumed in silence.
Holst requires an unusually large orches-
tra for this work: 4 flutes (2 of them dou-
bling piccolo, 1 doubling bass flute in G), 3
oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clari-
net, 3 bassoons, double bassoon, 6 horns,
4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tenor tuba, bass
tuba, 6 kettle drums, 2 harps, celeste, or-
gan, strings, and 4 percussion players for
triangle, side drum, tambourine, cymbals,
bass drum, gong, bells, glockenspiel, and
xylophone.
OTHER GREAT ALBUMS
ON SERAPHIM:
TCHAIKOVSKY: Suites from ‘‘The Nut-
cracker” & “Sleeping Beauty.” Sir Ad-
rian Boult conducting the Royal Philhar-
monic Orchestra. Seraphim S-60176
GERSHWIN: Rhapsody in Blue; An Ameri-
can in Paris. Leonard Pennario (piano);
Felix Slatkin conducting the Hollywood
Bowl Symphony Orchestra.
Seraphim S-60174
ELGAR: Enigma Variations. BRITTEN: Vari-
ations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell
(‘Young Person’s Guide to the Orches-
tra’). Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting
the Philharmonia & B.B.C. Symphony
Orchestras. Seraphim S-60173
DUKAS: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. RAVEL:
Bolero. CHABRIER: Espana. DEBUSSY:
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.
SAINT-SAENS:.-Danse Macabre. Pierre
Dervaux conducting the Colonne Con-
certs Orchestra. Seraphim S-60177
<} THIS RECORD 1S ENGINEERED & MANUFACTURED IN ACCORDANCE WITH STANDARDS DEVELOPED BY THE RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC., A NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICA
TED TO THE BETTERMENT OF RECORDED MUSIC & LITERATURE.
PRINTED IN U.S.A
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