The huge popularity of The Planets has unfairly overshadowed the rest of Holst's output.
Here is a fine antidote. Howard Griffiths and the English Sinfonia, with excellent soloists, offer six works, four from the last five years of Holst's life (he died in 1934, aged 59), when his writing was at its most vivid.
The well-known St Paul's Suite, with its lively Jig and brilliant interweaving of Greensleeves and The Dargason, is as English as they come.
Much less widely appreciated is the Double Concerto, for two violins, which reveals a more pensive, sometimes gritty, determination.
Perhaps the Lyric Movement for viola and small orchestra is marginally less appealing.
Not so A Fugal Concerto - flute, oboe, strings - with its delightful, folky fast movements.
Similarly the dreamy A Song Of The Night. At bargain price, hard to resist.
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