Imogen Holst: Discovering Imogen album review – expressive works from composer hiding in plain sight

BBC Concert Orchestra/BBC Singers/Farnham
(NMC)
The daughter of Gustav and assistant to Benjamin Britten, Imogen Holst wrote her own imaginative and unsentimental music, gathered here for the first time

Imogen Holst has been hiding in plain sight as a composer, in the shadow not only of her father Gustav, but also of Britten, whose assistant she was for 12 years. Even those who knew her personally did not realise how much she had composed until after her death. Much of it was “useful” music for specific occasions. Of the seven works recorded here, only the 1943 Suite for Strings was performed professionally, at a London concert her friends organised as a showcase for her work. She was never pushy enough to agitate for such an occasion herself.

It might not do her originality justice to begin with Persephone, a 1929 piece that shows the student Holst absorbing the influences of Stravinsky and, very obviously, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. Yet her mature, individual musical voice – harmonically imaginative, immediate and pleasingly unsentimental – comes over strongly, including in two previously unperformed choral anthems, despite a slightly murky blend of the voices in the recording mix. The highlights are the Suite and her variations on the 16th-century tune Loth to Depart, both full of Holst’s own muscular, piquant string writing – fans of Tippett’s string music will love it – and played with spark by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Alice Farnham.

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