Andrew Jenkins on Thaxted Festival’s Holst 150 celebrations

‘It was a feast – an orgy. Four whole days of perpetual singing and playing’. The Whitsuntide festivals that Gustav Holst ran in Thaxted from 1916 to 1918 were a very different affair to the current festival. Holst had discovered Thaxted in 1913 during a walking holiday in the Essex countryside, falling in love with its charm and architecture, and with the grandeur of its parish church. By 1914, the composer and his wife Isobel were renting a cottage with a magnificent view of the church, and he had become firm friends with the socialist vicar, Conrad Noel. The pair dreamed of hosting a festival in the cathedral-like building.

It was Holst’s students that made this dream a reality. He was working at Morley College and St Paul’s Girls School in London, and he enlisted the forces of their choirs and instrumentalists (past and present) who descended, music in hand, on the town in June 1916. The ‘Morleyites’, as he described them, had been rehearsing Bach’s Missa Brevis in A major since January (performing it at their college concert just one week before), and the work became the focal point of the services that bookended the Sunday, with other music-making crammed in between.

©Thaxted Festival

Holst’s description of the event reads like a quirky scene from the countryside of Hardy or Dickens: ‘In the intervals between the services people drifted into the church and sang motets or played the violin or cello. And others caught bad colds through going on long walks in the pouring rain, singing madrigals and folk songs and rounds all the time.’

The music-making lasted 14 hours a day, with the musicians sleeping on the vicarage floor. All the while Holst was scribbling out the orchestration of what would go on to be his most celebrated work, The Planets. Holst dreamed of a Festival and the onset of world war one didn’t put him off. That 1916 Festival became a great distraction to all the performers who escaped London for the weekend.

From 1918, there would be a Whitsuntide festival in cathedrals UK-wide and in the city churches of London and, rolling forward to 1980, a new festival (now employing professional musicians) was established in the town. Come 2024, the festival has become a four-weekend event and it would be remiss, in this anniversary year, not to celebrate Holst’s legacy.

To keep within the limits of what we can reasonably achieve, I have concentrated first on his works for chamber orchestra: with two concerts from the London Mozart Players spanning from his St Paul’s Suite of 1913, written prior to the first festival for his pupils in Hammersmith, to two works from the end of his life – the folk-inspired Brook Green Suite (again written for St Paul’s), and the Lyric Movement for viola and orchestra. By the time this final work was performed in 1934, in a studio broadcast for the BBC conducted by Adrian Boult, Holst was unable to attend due to his poor health. He died two months later.

Both his St Paul’s Suite and The Planets materialise in a different guise with folk duo Stevens and Pound, played on harmonica, melodeon and percussion.

Thaxted Festival co-produced a performance of The Planets at Saffron Hall in April, with the forces of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner. The Festival’s reaction to that piece is COSMOS on 7 July. A combination of words and music, relevant to each of the seven movements of The Planets, with Zeb Soanes, Selina Cadell and the Echo Ensemble, under Noah Max – an eclectic mix of music from Britten to Ives and recitations from WH Auden to Charles Dickins.

Holst’s connection with Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, originally intended as incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, cannot be underestimated. After Purcell’s death in 1695, the score was lost, despite an appeal in 1701 to find it, even with a reward! Only fragments survived until a copy of the full score was discovered on a shelf at the Royal Academy of Music, around 1900. Holst was responsible for the first complete modern performance in 1911, enlisting students from Morley College to copy 1,500 pages of vocal and orchestral parts. He conducted that performance at the Royal Victoria Hall (now the Old Vic), with Vaughan Williams giving the introduction. Christopher Monks leads Armonico Consort and Baroque Players in a performance of The Fairy Queen on 6 July, as part of the Holst weekend.

Dr Joseph Fort, a Holst scholar and director of music at King’s College London, produced a new realisation of Holst’s mighty The Cloud Messenger for chorus and orchestra for Thaxted festival in 2022. The choir of King’s College return this year, alongside the English Chamber Orchestra, for a performance of Holst’s First Choral Symphony, its orchestration reduced to a more manageable scale. The text draws on the works of Keats, and with his typical insecurities Holst wrote to Vaughan Williams in November 1925: ‘I’m not at all sure that the K S [Keats Symphony] is good at all. Just at present I believe I like it which is more that I can say about most of my things.’ He had apparently changed his mind by March 1926, when he wrote to his friend W. G. Whittaker that ‘[it] is the best thing I have written!’

On a smaller scale, soprano Sarah Leonard will be performing Holst’s intriguing 12 Songs, with words by the Italian-born British poet and civil servant Humbert Wolfe. Their first performance, at the Paris home of Éditions de l’Oiseau Lyre founder Louise Dyer in 1912, is a story in and of itself and will be shared by Holst scholar Dr Philippa Tudor.

© Monoki Media / Thaxted Festival

For me, the highlight of the Holst celebrations will be two mornings of amateur music-making, with local musicians invited to participate in informal music-making on the festival stage, including choirs, instrumentalists, and ensembles. This returns the festival to the inspiration for those original Whitsun performances. As Holst wrote after the first festival: ‘I realise now why the bible insists on heaven being a place where people sing and go on singing… It was heaven. Just as the amateur’s way of using music as a sedative or a stimulant is purgatory, and the professional’s way of using music as a topic of conversation or means of getting money is hell.’

It is my mission, as artistic director, to continue Holst’s inspiring nurturing of young talent with our Developing Artists Programme. Over the last year, we have presented early-career musicians throughout Essex and the spirit of this continues this Festival, with Iyad Sughayer, Armand Djikoluom from the Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT), plus baritone Neil Balfour, Echo Ensemble and singers and players from Wild Arts’ production of The Magic Flute. Next year we continue our collaboration with the Leeds International Piano Competition, presenting the 2024 winner in recital. This year also sees the culmination of a two-year residency with young composer Noah Max, marked by the world première of his first symphony at the opening night on 21 June. Thaxted Festival has often been described as ‘punching above its weight’, I hope this year is no exception.

Thaxted Festivals runs from 21 June to 14 July 2024. Further information, including tickets, can be found here.