When conductor Alice Farnham talks about Imogen Holst, she immediately starts smiling. ‘What comes through in all Holst’s music is a sense of joy and positivity’, she tells me. Farnham has just finished recording a new disc of Holst’s works with the BBC Singers and BBC Concert Orchestra, and is full of enthusiasm for both the composer and her music. The music is ‘beautifully written and crafted’, she says, and Holst herself is a source of admiration. ‘There isn’t another musician of the 20th century, I don’t think, who has done everything that she did’ – and, she adds, ‘off stage, behind closed doors, Holst had a wicked sense of humour!’

Since her death in 1984, Imogen Holst, or ‘Imo’ as she was known, has been cast as a peripheral figure (a ‘side person’, as Farnham puts it), someone who stood in the combined shadows of her father Gustav Holst, and Benjamin Britten, who she assisted for over a decade. As a composer Holst is very little known, despite her output extending to around 200 original works and arrangements, including a ballet, an opera, a Mass, a violin concerto, oboe concerto, songs, hymns, choral works, chamber pieces, orchestral suites, and incidental music.

Partly, Holst’s neglect as a composer stems from the fact that the majority of her scores remained unpublished at the time of her death, making it extremely difficult for her music to be performed or recorded. Farnham admits that before working on this recording, ’I genuinely didn’t know much about her, I’m ashamed to say’. But Holst is slowly starting to reemerge as a composer. Recordings of selected chamber and choral works have begun to reveal a unique compositional voice, and Faber & Faber has acquired her full catalogue, making her scores widely accessible for the first time. Even so, as for so many women composers of this period, only a fraction of Holst’s music has yet been recorded. The works on Farnham’s disc traverse three decades of composition, covering both choral and orchestral pieces – and yet they are all world premiere recordings.

Farnham describes this process of discovery as one of real excitement. ‘It’s so wonderful because you get all these scores and no recordings, and you just have to study them to try and get into her world.’ Two of the largest works on the disc are Persephone, a tone poem written in 1929, and a 1946 Festival Anthem for choir and orchestra. Composed while Holst was still studying at the Royal College of Music, Persephone is sumptuously scored in a compelling, pictorial style. Holst gave no explicit programme in the score, though. ‘There were no bits where you think, “Oh that sounds like underworld music”, ’ Farnham explains – the piece is more built on suggestion and evocation. Stylistically, Persephone occupies a similar sound world to that of Holst’s contemporary Dorothy Howell, whose 1919 tone poem Lamia bears striking similarities to Persephone – both show a clear engagement with French impressionism, especially Ravel.

The Festival Anthem is quite a different work, rooted in the English choral tradition and building on composers like Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. At around 15 minutes long and in one movement, it presents a great deal of challenges for the singers. It’s ‘quite physically taxing’, Farnham says, ‘but it felt really natural to sing. I think she was such a good composer of choral music because she really understood the nature of the English language. Everything falls incredibly naturally.’ Beyond a dedication to Holst’s friend Dorothy Elmhirst, though, the origins of the Festival Anthem remain something of a mystery. It’s possible that Holst wrote it for a particular occasion, but there is no record of the Anthem ever having been performed at all. It was left untended in a drawer, so this recording marks its first ever performance.

What animates all of Holst’s works, throughout all the stylistic changes she experimented with, is her love of dance. As a child she had trained to be a dancer, but her health prevented her from making this her career. Her love of dance, however, continued throughout her career. ‘With all the music I feel like dance was the way into it’, Farnham tells me. ‘She understood it from the actual physical movement.’ It was partly dance that drew Holst to the folk revival movement, which remained a formidable influence in both her own and her father’s work. She was a committed admirer of the folk-song collector Cecil Sharp, founder of the English Folk Dance Society, which Holst had joined when she was just 16. She wrote in 1959 that ‘of all causes for gratitude, none can compare with the debt that the English composers of 50 years ago owed to Cecil Sharp.’ Following Sharp’s lead, she herself wrote more than 150 arrangements of folk songs, and folk-inspired melodies and harmonies permeate works like On Westhall Hill (c 1935). Holst retained her connections to the society, and this orchestral piece was most likely written for its orchestra, which Holst directed in the 1930s.

Holst often wrote for groups she ran herself – of which there were many, because she wasn’t just important as a composer. She had extraordinary influence as a conductor, teacher, speaker (the actress and singer Joyce Grenfell called Holst ‘a miracle of erudition, simplicity, interest, passion and wit’)and administrator, shaping the landscape of British music in the 20th century. It was under Holst’s direction that the music course at Dartington became a leading centre for composition education, training generations of musicians, and as one of the artistic directors of the Aldeburgh Festival she helped transform it into the international series that it is today.

She was committed to supporting new music, and by ensuring that money from the Holst Foundation was put towards supporting contemporary composers, she was also involved with founding the record label NMC, on which Farnham’s disc will be released. For the last 35 years, the label has supported British composers, promoting works like Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Mask of Orpheus, which was released via NMC in 1997. ‘Imogen Holst was a visionary’, says composer Colin Matthews, NMC’s executive producer. ‘She was so thoroughly musical – a pioneer in the early music world, an exceptional teacher, and an impressive conductor.’ The full extent of her legacy is still being revealed, from her extensive training of amateur groups, to the concerts she organised as a leader in the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts during the Second World War.

With such a litany of achievements behind her, it seems extraordinary that Holst should be relatively unknown now. But it’s so common for women composers of this period to have been posthumously belittled and sidelined, cast as ‘merely’ muses or assistants regardless of what their own talents might have been, their compositions remaining unpublished and unrecorded. Holst’s colleagues Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams also have reputations now that do not reflect their significance within their own lifetimes, and Holst’s predecessor Ethel Smyth is still recovering from decades of being dismissed as an eccentric rather than being taken seriously as a composer of merit.

Women have had to fight harder to have their music performed, to be listened to, and to be remembered – a situation that has impacted on even the most determined and tenacious individuals. And in Holst’s case, she was not somebody who would relentlessly advocate for herself. ‘She was always very self-effacing’, Matthews says. Farnham agrees that although Holst did ‘incredible work and could be very authoritative and very critical’, she was nonetheless ‘happy not to take the limelight’. Holst needs champions to ensure that her work does not recede even further into the background, and one of the most important steps is to record her music, to give it a chance to be heard and performed. Holst knew how vital it was that contemporary composers have access to publishers and record companies if their music was to survive. It seems fitting that her legacy is being celebrated by making sure she finally has access to the same kinds of opportunities she so generously gave to generations of young musicians, quietly building foundations for the future of music-making in Britain.

Discovering Imogen is out on NMC on 6 September

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Choir & Organ. Never miss an issue – subscribe today