An ideal pairing: two of Holst's most ambitious, imaginative and questing creations, still under-appreciated to this day. Initially inspired by a volume of Keats's poetry given to the composer by his daughter, Imogen, the First Choral Symphony (by the time of its Leeds Festival premiere in 1925, Holst was apparently already contemplating a successor) contains pages that are amongst the most original Holst ever conceived, not least the opening ''Invocation to Pan'' and extraordinarily intense setting of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Though far shorter than its partner here, the Choral Fantasia (1930) is in some ways an even tougher nut to crack. Like the Choral Symphony, it met with critical incomprehension, though Holst's good friend Vaughan Williams was by all accounts much taken with its haunting, almost incantatory manner. In 1988, EMI transferred to CD Sir Adrian Boult's fine pioneering 1974 recording of the Choral Symphony, coupling it with a distinguished Choral Fantasia under the exemplary guidance of Imogen Holst from ten years earlier. That desirable issue disappeared all too quickly, so this new Hyperion release obviously plugs an important gap.
First, the good news. Hilary Davan Wetton presides over a strong account of the Choral Fantasia, and these performers succeed in conveying much of the strange, hieratic majesty of this powerful score. The recording is immensely full-blooded. With the Choral Symphony, we move away from Guildford Cathedral (perhaps the Hyperion team feared its more complex pages would have quickly degenerated into aural mush). But here's where my reservations arise, for the switch to the far less accommodating (and notoriously tricky) acoustic of London's Henry Wood Hall doesn't strike me as a happy choice. Not that Tony Faulkner's balance is in any way second-rate, you understand (dynamics, too, are excitingly wide-ranging), but this music needs far more breathing-space than it gets here, and the unhelpfully dry surroundings impart a deadly 'woodenness' to the proceedings.
Actually, some of the blame must also be laid at Wetton's doorstep: his reading generally lacks poetry and authority (Holst's disparate finale in particular requires a firmer hand on the tiller), and his Guildford choir, though reasonably well-drilled, could do with more body of tone and greater unanimity of attack. Neither is soprano Lynne Dawson quite at her freshest (at times—the unaccompanied start of the finale, for example—she sounds a little taxed by Holst's admittedly not inconsiderable demands); similarly, the playing of the RPO is good without ever being inspired.
It grieves me to be so unenthusiastic about the main work on what is, let's face it, such a useful coupling. However, in the continuing absence of the EMI disc (an urgent candidate for mid-price reissue in that company's British Composers series, I would have thought), I suppose this Hyperion enterprise deserves a cautious recommendation all the same, though let me also put in a plea to Chandos to allow Richard Hickox and his superb LSO forces to give us their thoughts on this fascinating repertoire before too long.'