Holst placed his Suite de ballet firmly among his self-styled ''Early Horrors'', and Imogen Holst duly flinched at ''the banality of its borrowed Romanticism''. I wonder if she would still flinch: she came to revise most of her more dismissive opinions of her father's music upwards, and hearing the piece now, when Holst is so much more widely accepted and understood, one finds less to recoil from and more to warm to. It is true that the invention is not very personal, but the tunes are blameless enough, even quite fetching, and the masterly orchestration even at this stage of Holst's career sees to it that they are presented to best advantage. The ''Scene de nuit'' is ravishingly scored for strings alone: what Holst managed to draw from a string orchestra here alone is worth half a textbook.
Nicholas Braithwaite conducts the piece with evident belief in it, and he swings into the Capriol Suite with a will. He is almost too committed: he makes the elegant ''Pieds en l'air'' sound a trifle too big for its boots, if you see what I mean, though there is a splendidly sinister tread to the Pavane—a glimpse here of Warlock's forked tail showing beneath Heseltine's scholarly robe. He plays the Serenade for strings for all it is worth, which is not really very much. Delius did all that much better, as he did the drooping chromatics of the very little known An old song. This must be something left over from one of Sir Adrian Boult's sessions waiting for a good home.
The recording is clear and well-balanced in all works, which it needs to be especially in Holst's Suite so as to do justice to the scoring. All in all, an interesting, well-made record, for avid Holstians but also for Warlock's devotees.'