Part 1

BBC Women's Chorus (Chorus-Master, Leslie Woodgate)
BBC Symphony Orchestra (Leader, Paul Beard)
Conducted by Sir Adrian Boult

Part 1 at 8.0
Music for the King's Sackbuts and Cornets...Matthew Locke
The Planets...Holst
Mars: The Bringer of War
Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity
Venus: The Bringer of Peace
Saturn: The Bringer of Old Age
Mercury: The Winged Messenger
Uranus: The Magician
Neptune: The Mystic

Part 2 at 9.15
Symphony No. 4, in F minor...Tchaikovsky

Matthew Locke, who is mentioned in Pepys' diary, was born about 1630 and died in 1677. He was a choir boy at Exeter Cathedral; he then went to London and (as Roger North put it) 'conformed at last to the modes of his time, and fell into the theatrical way - writing, with Christopher Gibbons, the masque Cupid and Death and part of the music for Davenant's Siege of Rhodes. In June 1660 he was appointed 'composer in the private musick' of Charles II, and on April 22, 1661, the day before the Coronation, Locke's music 'for ye king's sagbutts and cornett,' was played during the royal progress from the Tower of London to Whitehall. Tonight the music is played by trumpets and trombones (the latter instruments being the modern equivalent of sackbuts).

It was Sir Adrian Boult who, in the words of the composer 'first caused The Planets to shine in public, and earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst.' This huge suite of seven movements, designed for a very large orchestra, owed its origin to Holst's interest in astrology; but its originality and splendour were due to his searching imagination and first-hand knowledge of orchestral effect Nothing remotely like The Planets had appeared in British music before Its impact was direct and inescapable: it owed. moreover, practically nothing to nineteenth-century romanticism.

It must have been a wonderful occasion, that Sunday morning in September 1918, when The Planets first swam into the ken of a group of Holst's friends gathered together in Queen's Hall. The performance was arranged as a 'parting present' from Balfour Gardiner, before Holst left for Salonika to organise musical activities among the troops in the Near East. (Harold Rutland)