We no longer need to be put off by the fact that Gustav Holst thought so little of these two quintets—one for piano and wind, the other for wind alone—that in 1925 he asked Edwin Evans not to list them in the Cobbett Cyclopedia of Chamber Music. By then he had in any case lost track of the scores, which he had sent to different wind-players who had never bothered to return them. They have only re-emerged much more recently, with both scores bought by private collectors, the A minor in the late 1960s, the A flat in 1952, with the full score re-appearing in 1978 among the papers of a friend of Holst. It was then published in an edition by Imogen Holst and Colin Matthews, with cuts made in the first two movements to provide a better balance.
They are both early works, written well before Holst developed his individual style, but had already acquired formidable technical skill. The A minor for piano and wind was written in 1896 when he was 22 and was still studying at the Royal College of Music, the year after he first met Vaughan Williams. It is a fair example of music written by a Stanford pupil, with often-Brahmsian textures, but with material that relates more to an updated Mendelssohn, easy-going, fresh and attractive music built on some charming, jauntily rhythmic ideas. The Wind Quintet dates from 1903, the year he gave up the trombone and just before he became a schoolteacher at a girls' school, an appointment which two years later led to his lifetime job as Director of Music at St Paul's Girls School. This is an even gentler piece, with all four of its compact movements easy-going. The warmly lyrical slow movement leads to a canonic minuet that in its neat ingenuity sounds rather too like a composition exercise, though like the rest still attractive.
Dating from 1962, when the composer was in his late sixties, the Gordon Jacob Sextet— for piano and wind quintet—is similarly unpretentious. Starting with a wistfully lyrical slow movement, its five brief movements have little truck with sonata-form, but consistently reveal the brilliant craftsmanship that marks all of Jacob's work. It completes a genial disc. In first-rate sound the performances are genial and sympathetic to match, not perhaps as biting as they might be, but making points neatly and stylishly.'