MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Marxist notes on music: January 22, 2023
Time to celebrate Gustav Holst, an innovator who helped bring brass band instruments into the orchestra and wrote for working-class musicians
LIFE IN PICTURES: (L to R) Gustav Holst, left, and Ralph Vaughan Williams walking in the Malvern Hills, September 1921; The house in Barnes where Holst lived between 1908 and 1913; Holst caricatured by F Sancha as ‘The Bringer of Jollity’ c1921
[(L to R) William Gillies Whittaker/CC - Peter Trimming/CC - Public domain]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
GUSTAV HOLST is a composer who is one of the most obvious demonstrations of a composer known almost entirely for one work — The Planets Suite. Written 1914-17, the composition is a tour-de-force, which sadly is often overlooked because of the likes of Classic FM and others focusing purely on the barn-stomping movement Mars and Jupiter.
On September 21 we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth and for me a high point as he has had a wonderful influence on me throughout my life, particularly when I reflect on what it means to be an English composer.
I got my foundational musical education through brass banding. It was also colliery bands where I learnt a lot of my politics too — chatting to the old boys about their experiences during the ’84-85 strike and other union struggles.
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