Maida Vale on a wet January night is no one’s idea of a theatre of dreams. But it’s here, between the fluorescent lights and the scuffed parquet, that magic is happening once again. It’s the final recording session of the day and the last teacups are being cleared away in the band room. Only conductor Alice Farnham, the BBC Singers and the strings of the BBC Concert Orchestra are left behind at the London studio to do some patching. The red light blinks on: ‘From 154,’ says Farnham, and warm string chords fill the studio, unfurling in layers. A pause – ‘A little bit more cello’ – and then onwards. A solo baritone breaks clear and Farnham pauses once more: ‘Maybe not so slow on “Oh Lord”?’ She sings to illustrate her point, and then turns to the orchestra again: ‘Let’s go on – unless Colin wants to jump in?’

There’s a muffled ‘No’ from the monitors, and the music sweeps on: a choral climax, topped by shining sopranos as the strings cascade through the texture. The mood is eminently practical, even businesslike. Professionals like these know their craft and Maida Vale has seen innumerable recording sessions over the decades. What’s different tonight is that this luminous, passionate music isn’t just being recorded for the first time, it’s actually being played and heard for the first time too. It’s Imogen Holst’s Festival Anthem, one of a series of her works that NMC is recording as part of the label’s 35th-anniversary celebrations. And the producer – that disembodied voice from the control room – is composer Colin Matthews.

As NMC’s founder and Executive Producer, Matthews has overseen countless recordings since he created the label in 1989. But this one feels particularly personal. Without Imogen Holst, it’s unlikely that Matthews would have had the career he’s had, or that NMC would exist at all. They met in Aldeburgh in the early 1970s – he as an emerging young composer and assistant to Britten, she as an artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival and biographer (and chief votary) of her father, Gustav. Matthews’s enthusiasm for the music of Gustav Holst is well known – his Pluto, the Renewer (2000), a sequel to The Planets, is one of the most performed British orchestral works of the 21st century. Was that what brought him into Imogen’s orbit? ‘No, that’s actually how I became interested in Gustav – through meeting Imogen! I was working with Britten at Aldeburgh in the early ’70s, and she asked me to help prepare the thematic catalogue of her father’s music for his centenary in 1974. I worked with her from 1972 until her death in 1984, and we did quite a lot on Holst editions and recordings. So I got to know her really well.’

In an atmosphere like Aldeburgh’s, one creative project tends to lead to another. Imo (‘You can’t go around calling her Imogen,’ says Matthews. ‘She was Imo to everybody. She never used anything else’) never lived to see the launch of NMC, but Matthews is emphatic that the idea of a record label dedicated to new and neglected modern British music would never have arisen without her.

‘Gustav Holst went out of copyright at the end of 1984, so she actually didn’t live to see that. But she’d been very clear that she wanted his income to go into a charitable fund which would support the music of living composers.’ For nearly four decades, the Holst Foundation, founded by her in 1981, provided a vital income stream for the fledgling NMC. Matthews explains how a legacy project grew into a record label: ‘The model for her was Vaughan Williams, who set up the RVW Trust to support living composers. We discussed quite a lot of things that we could do with the money, including recording, which seemed to be too large a project at that stage. So in the first few years after Imo died, we subsidised a few concerts, and for me that was the catalyst. We underwrote a concert with the Philharmonia and Olly Knussen at Aldeburgh. It wasn’t broadcast, so it reached only 800 people. I thought: “My goodness, we put £25,000 into this – there must be better ways of spending the money!” And that was the impetus for setting up NMC.’

From left: William Servaes, Peter Pears, Colin Matthews, Imogen Holst, Donald Mitchell – Aldeburgh, 1976 (Bridgeman Images)

There’s still no organisation quite like it: a record label with the structure and ethos of an arts charity, whose missionary zeal for new British music extends to a commitment that no recording in its catalogue, once released, will ever be deleted. That now includes Imogen Holst’s own music. The two choral works that were being patched at Maida Vale – Festival Anthem and What Man Is He? – form part of an emerging picture of a distinctive, and strikingly ambitious, compositional voice.

‘We wanted to do some of the larger-scale works, and neither of those had actually been performed. She wrote these big choral pieces, and then seemed to move on without trying to get performances. That’s particularly the case with Festival Anthem, for which she didn’t even produce a full score. It was written while she was in residence at Dartington.’ She worked at the Devon arts centre from 1942 to 1951. ‘There’s no indication at all that it was ever performed, otherwise she would have put in all the phrasing and dynamics. She made a vocal score, which is almost completely unedited: there are no dynamics, no tempo markings, but all the notes are there. I feel that that work was a really important big statement: it’s a 15- or 16-minute quite tough choral piece.

‘But the first piece that we recorded – and it’s really quite extraordinary – is this early symphonic poem called Persephone.She wrote it while still a student at the Royal College of Music, London – about 1929, when she was only 21 or 22. It doesn’t sound remotely like her father; it’s got echoes of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. Then there’s another small orchestral piece based on folk tunes, called On Westhall Hill; and the big Suite for strings from 1943, which was one of the few pieces that actually had a professional performance in her lifetime. There’s her variations on Giles Farnaby’s Loth to Depart – written for a mixture of professional and amateur performers, but there are absolutely no concessions in it. I can’t imagine what the first performance was like, because even the BBC Concert Orchestra found it pretty tough!’

And yet somehow, for four decades, all this music – by a composer with a famous name, who was active for much of her career at the very heart of Britain’s (and specifically Britten’s) new music scene – has lain unrecorded and unheard. ‘She was very performance-focused, except when it came to her own music,’ says Matthews. ‘She was always incredibly self-effacing about it. We didn’t know until we started cataloguing everything quite how much music she’d written – it was a slow process, but now it’s taking off. I spend half my life now responding to requests for unpublished pieces by Imo: she completed around two hundred scores in total. Persephone had one performance under Malcolm Sargent with Royal College of Music students, and certainly her father liked it a lot; but it never went any further – as was the case with the work of a lot of women composers at that time.’

There’s the rub, surely. Looking back from the 21st century, it’s increasingly clear that if many 20th-century female composers suffered wilful neglect from a male-dominated musical establishment, others seemed to impose a subordinate role upon themselves. The idea of a composer as vital and original as Imogen Holst making a conscious choice to spend her career as a factotum at the court of Benjamin Britten is a troubling one in 2024. Matthews witnessed it at first hand: ‘The one thing she really would not want to talk about was her own music. I used to badger her about it. Only at the end of her life – when I managed to persuade her to write a string quintet, which got published by Faber – was she happy to speak. She said, “At last I feel like a real composer.”’

It’s a heartbreaking thought. But times change, and there’s a new attitude abroad – a determination to get past that self-imposed wall of silence. In Stratford-upon-Avon in February 2024, a few weeks after the NMC sessions, the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered Mark Ravenhill’s play Ben and Imo. It centres on Britten’s struggle to complete his coronation opera Gloriana, and the actor Victoria Yeates played Imo as a free-spirited bluestocking who locks horns with a nervy, defensive Britten while grappling with her own unshakeable devotion to the legacy of her dead father.

Did Matthews see the play? ‘I couldn’t, really, because I knew I would find things in it that I didn’t like – even though I met Mark Ravenhill and talked with him quite a bit. There are a lot of good things in it, but from what I know, it seems to unbalance her relationship with Britten. She absolutely worshipped Britten, and I think some of what is in the play – about her standing up to him – was not really the case. When I was working with her, I was also working with Britten, and she was absolutely adamant that he had to have priority. There are extraordinary stories: at the first performance of The Turn of the Screw in Venice, Britten couldn’t read his pencil score because of the poor lighting in the pit, so she went over the entire score in ink for him.’ Quite happily? ‘Yes. It needed doing, and she was there to do it. I can’t think that it was anything other than what she wanted to do. Perhaps because she’d been so close to her father, she needed somebody she could work with in that way. She was in one sense a feminist, feeling that women were neglected, but I don’t think she felt neglected herself. She was very happy when her pieces got performed, but she didn’t push them. And she had a lot of independence. She was, from early on, an artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. Her programmes were extraordinary – very innovative. She was one of the pioneers of early music.

‘Imo had two sides to her. There was the public face, which was very correct and precise. If you hear any of her broadcasts, she uses very precise language. But in private she would give huge bursts of laughter, and her voice would drop an octave when she actually talked in conversation. She was an odd mixture: she was famous for walking along Aldeburgh High Street with her head in the air, so she didn’t have to talk to anybody. I don’t think she was shy. It was because she liked to follow her own train of thought when she went for a walk, and didn’t want to be interrupted.’

Now we too can join that train of thought – uninterrupted. The new album gives us a full programme of Imogen Holst thinking musically on a scale that affirms her place as infinitely more than an ancillary creative voice in post-war Aldeburgh. There’s every reason to expect that it will make an impact, too. NMC’s previous Holst disc – a 2017 release of her string chamber music – was a surprise hit for the label. ‘It was one of our top sellers, and streamed more than anything else of ours,’ says Matthews.

And, of course, it’s just part of NMC’s ongoing commitment to new and neglected music, and a catalogue of projects that ranges from the extraordinary ‘NMC Songbook’ of 2009 – an anthology of some hundred specially commissioned songs by nearly as many British composers which won the Contemporary category in the Gramophone Awards – to Anthony Payne’s astonishing 1998 ‘elaboration’ of Elgar’s incomplete Third Symphony (‘I made sure nobody else grabbed it before we did,’ remembers Matthews) and the late Sir Andrew Davis’s 1998 Gramophone Award-winning account of Birtwistle’s colossal The Mask of Orpheus. ‘The Elgar was one of our few recordings to make a profit, and The Mask of Orpheus will never make any profit, however long it goes on,’ laughs Matthews. ‘Also, they’re the two things of which I’m proudest.’

Nor is Holst the only 35th-anniversary project. The release schedule for 2024 includes debut portrait albums for Freya Waley-Cohen and Tom Coult, with recordings of music by Lisa Illean, Richard Baker (both debuts), Michael Zev Gordon and Anthony Payne already on sale. Every one of these NMC projects is, in its own way, part of Imogen Holst’s legacy – a continuation of a life devoted to the idea that a musical tradition is about the future as well as the past. The difference is that Imo’s own musical voice is finally part of that story: a story that she was among the first to tell, and which continues to unfold in ways that she could never have imagined. Matthews is certain that she’d have been delighted: ‘Very much so. She’s alive in my head, in a way. I feel I can still always ask her questions: she was such a larger-than-life personality. She’s influenced me throughout. I feel very much that NMC was developing with her blessing – and that she would have thoroughly approved of what we’ve done.’

‘Imogen Holst: Discovering Imogen’ on NMC is released September 6

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Gramophone. Whether you want to enjoy Gramophone online, explore our unique Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues stretching back to April 1923, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com