On another planet

In the lapidary biography she left of her father, Imogen Holst included a vivid account of the dismay with which he faced the fame thrust upon him in the early 1920s by the sudden success of The Planets. No 20th- century composer seems to have courted it less.

Committed to a philosophy of learning by doing, Holst regarded it all the same whether he was making music with the London Symphony Orchestra or with a classroom of 12-year-old schoolgirls. And, conditioned both by the demands of his teaching and by his dislike of repeating himself, his output not only remained bemusingly disparate from first to last but - as if to make it the more unpromotable - was scattered between a dozen publishers.

Behind all this lay a belief that the ultimate function of art was not to express the self but to escape from it into some higher condition - though this might be as readily achieved in the communal singing of a simple round as in the sublime climax of some great choral work. Despite the ubiquity of a handful of his pieces, it is perhaps no wonder that the critical jury is still out on whether Holst's achievement was wholly great, successful or even coherent.

Over the last few weeks of Fairest Isle, Radio 3 has been attempting to find its own answers by insinuating many smaller Holst items - carols, part-songs, orchestral morceaux - into odd corners of the daily output and, on 20 December, by putting out an entire Holst Evening compered by Piers Burton-Page.

In this collage of music, reminiscences and discussions, the testimonies of pupils whom Holst once taught at St Paul's Girls School and of two of its more recent Directors of Music, Nicola LeFanu and Hilary Davan Wetton, were at least at one in acclaiming Holst's educational methods as decades ahead of their time. And the recorded voices of Vaughan Williams, Tippett, Britten and Elliott Carter (who actually studied with Holst in 1932) were equally emphatic on what they had learnt from his compositional example.

The music itself, running from the remarkably sustained early "Elegy" from the Cotswolds Symphony (1900) to the austere late masterpiece Egdon Heath (1928) by way of a special broadcast of the touching masque The Vision of Dame Christian (1909) composed for the exclusive use of St Paul's, reaffirmed Holst's range.

Yet in the summing-up, Colin Matthews - who, as latterday editor of much unpublished Holst, must understand him as well as anyone - was still pondering upon the essential mystery of his personality and wishing, for instance, that a recording had survived of his speaking voice to provide a few clues.

The matter was hardly clarified by the broadcast on Christmas Day of a new studio recording conducted by Vernon Handley of Holst's most famous failure, The Perfect Fool - famous not only because the opening ballet sequence of this one-act opera has, after all, become one of his most popular concert works, but because audiences staggered out of its so far only run at Covent Garden in 1923 exclaiming, "What does it all mean?"

It is indeed difficult to decide whether this fairy story of a Princess who falls for a sleepy Fool rather than a Verdian Troubadour, Wagnerian Traveller or vengeful Wizard, amounts to an allegory or remains a burlesque that got out of hand. But if the work's future in the theatre looks doubtful, it should certainly be released on disc, for its characteristic juxtapositions of the rumbustious and the ethereal are full of Holstian trouvailles in harmony and orchestration.

And these in turn remind one of what was surely his most constant quality, whether writing for amateurs or professionals, whether exploring some novel harmonic scheme or manipulating the timeless basics of counterpoint: the primal pleasure he communicates in putting notes together and then hearing how they go.

BAYAN NORTHCOTT