Holst IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER film

[Angle]

It is good to see that BBC4 will be showing Palmer's film about Holst on Sunday 24 April at 21.00.

"The first ever full-length film about Gustav Holst, composer and revolutionary - a man who taught himself Sanskrit; lived in a street of brothels in Algiers; cycled into the Sahara Desert; allied himself during the First World War with a 'red priest' who pinned on the door of his church 'prayers at noon for the victims of Imperial Aggression'; hated the words used to his most famous tune, I Vow to Thee My Country, because it was the opposite of what he believed; and distributed a newspaper called the Socialist Worker. Holst's music - especially the Planets - owed little or nothing to anyone, least of all the English folk song tradition, but he was a great composer who died of cancer, broken and disillusioned, before he was 60."

"The first ever full-length tv biography of Holst includes previously unseen material with his daughter Imogen, his pupils Michael Tippett, Herbert Howells, Edmund Rubbra and the 102 year-old Elliott Carter, as well as a dozen pupils from St Paul's Girls School in Hammersmith who remember him. RK2 An Isolde Films production"

[kernelbogey]

A very interesting article by Tony Palmer about his film, and his ideas about Holst, in today's Guardian, here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/apr/21/gustav-holst-tony-palmer

[salymap]

kernelbogey Thanks a lot for that. I have been trying to persuade a senior MBer of the worth of Beni Mora, perhaps this will convince him. I visited the Thaxted Church years ago, I'm really looking forward to the film.

PS. Holst first had The Planets published by Goodwin & Tabb. the Music Library where I worked later. They did very little publishing and let the work go to Curwen. What a mistake.

[kernelbogey]

Salymap, you're welcome. I liked the idea that 'The Planets' title was an afterthought....
BW, kb

[Norfolk Born]

Amazingly, there's a programme about L S Lowry, featuring Sir Ian MacKellen, starting on ITV 1 just before the Holst ends. You wait ages for a decent arts programme to come along....

[kernelbogey]

Holst is also CotW next week.

[salymap]

Holst film tonight at 9pm on BBC4. It's been a long time coming, don't miss it!

[BBMmk2]

looks like BBC4 be the channel to watch tonight, anyways, salymap!!

[Norfolk Born]

There's a repeat scheduled for 00.20 on May 1st.

[DracoM]

If there is a repeat, then I urge everyone to see it.

Some of the editing is bizarre, but for someone as ignorant as me about Holst's music this was a total revelation, and worth every minute of its 2 hrs 20 mins. Fascinating about the man, his music, his working life, his friends and above all his cultural and spiritual context. Fine prog.

[moeranbiogman]

So after hearing extracts from Egdon Heath, the Perfect Fool, Beni Mora and the quite remarkable Lyric Movement - WHY couldn't we have had these at the Proms this year instead of yet ANOTHER 'Planets' !!

[Susianna]

An excellent two hours and 20 minutes, if you missed it do catch the repeat or watch on iPlayer. What a a fascinating film (apart from a few images which were alarming - but then it was Tony Palmer)

[Serial_Apologist]

An excellent two hours and 20 minutes, if you missed it do catch the repeat or watch on iPlayer. What a a fascinating film (apart from a few images which were alarming - but then it was Tony Palmer)

Yes - and why oh why those pictures of mountains to acompany "Egdon Heath"? I found the programme moving and riveting, although could have done without the chronological back and forth (which also marred Palmer's Vaughan Williams biop).

[kernelbogey]

Two threads now running - Mods, could they be merged please? kb

[Boilk]

No matter how much you may love Holst, Mr Palmer has dealt a plonker with this 140-minute documentary. Where to begin?

First of all it was a REAL chronological mish-mash – all over the place. The only thing missing from the astronomical imagery provided was the TARDIS itself.

The first half of the programme seemed to alternate 20 seconds of commentary with 10 minutes of music – pretty annoying when you hoped to learn about the man’s life.

(Too) early on we got endless renditions of I Vow to Thee My Country in order to hammer home (and I really mean ‘hammer’) how many kitsch versions have come about in recent times. Two or three versions would have sufficed. I call it ‘padding’. And after this, no précis was given to justify this medley.

The important point was made early on that The Planets was conceived as Seven Movements for Large Orchestra, with the planet names added later. Yet later on we got imagery of Jupiter accompanied by the fourth movement – which seemed to imply the opposite of the former, that he was indeed depicting that planet

As ever, orchestral performances were filmed in near-blackness, with intense spotlights on the performers – making for a suffocating silhouette-like ambience with the usual annoying highly compressed sound (such that quiet passages are artificially amplified à la BBC Radio 1) killing any chance of proper dynamic range.

Palmer has written that he remortgaged his property to get this expansive film made – but a fair chunk of that must have gone on paying for the myriad live performances, which could have been cut by half to the benefit of more biography or commentary. It was admirably demonstrated that Holst was a non-elitist musician happy to write for and be amongst ordinary people, but there was little offered in the way of contemporary opinion on his music. For example, no contemporary responses to early performances of The Planets were provided – there must have been many given its originality and boldness.

Ideally this patch-quilt of a doc could be cut down to under maybe 100 minutes.