HOLST'S "HYMN OF JESUS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 21

HOLST'S "HYMN OF JESUS"

Notable New Recordings From 4YZ

RECORDINGS of Gustav Holst’s choral work’ Hymn of Jesus made under the auspices of the British Council have now arrived here, and Station 4YZ, Invercargill, will broadcast them at 3.0 p.m. on Sunday, June 23. The text of this work comes from the Apocryphal Acts of St. John, and the recording was made by the Huddersfield Choral Society, with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Dr. Malcolm Sargent. When the BBC broadcast the work some years ago, A. E. F. Dickinson wrote a short introductory article about it in the Radio Times, and we have taken the following extract from it: "Of the ‘music which has appeared since the first world war, few works made a more forcible impression than Holst’s Hymn of Jesus and fewer have retained their capacity to thrill and astohish a public which has learnt to take the novelties of modern music for granted. "In this three-chorus setting of a mystical poem of religious initiation, the sheer variety of musical idea is still a challenge to one’s powers of real absorption, and still rather a shock to the conventionally religious. Old and undisturbed hymn tunes and primitive rhythmic reiterations jostle with piercingly discordant sequences and a studied versatility of metre.

"The sober dignity of the first full choral outburst seems almost to frown on the subsequent wild strains of ‘Divine grace is dancing,’ and the return to solemnity would be equally surprising if there were not a significant clue to the composer’s dramatic intentions where the chorus take up one of the hymn tunes to the words ‘Give ye heed unto my dancing; in me who speak, behold: yourselves. .. . For yours is the passion of man that I go to endure.’ When it becomes clear that the dancing symbolises the suffering but exultant spirit at the heart of the universe, the tense climax and the concluding adoration are a less astounding sequence. Yet saintliness and demoniac energy, sanity and passionate abandon, appear in a continuous orbit as never before, except perhaps in Beethoven." .