Three Folk Suites: Holst / Bartók / Shostakovich

The “St. Paul’s Suite” reveals a different side of the English composer, Gustav Holst (1874-1934), than that on display in his much-played “Planets”. The suite is dedicated to the string ensemble at St. Paul’s school for girls, where Holst taught. Lively, light-hearted and intensely rhythmic, the work’s four parts reveal the composer’s love for the expressive simplicity of English traditional music, his social ideal of one art for all, and his hopes for a soothing of political tensions between England and Ireland, to which end he artfully melds two traditional airs—one Irish, “The Dargason”, and one English, “Greensleeves” in the finale.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was commissioned to compose his “Dance Suite” for the celebrations held to mark the 50th anniversary of the joining of Buda, Pest and Óbuda, and was premiered on November 23, 1923. The Suite is typically Bartokian in being inspired by an idealised traditional music. The composer acknowledged the influence of Hungarian, Romanian and Arabic melodies on his work, but never used traditional motifs exactly as he found them.

The “Suite for Variety Orchestra” by Shostakovich (1906-1975) is a recently identified work from the great 20th-century symphonist. Conflated until recently with the composer’s “Jazz Suite No. 2”, it was recently shown to constitute a separate work in its own right. The march, three waltzes and two dances that make up the suite sometimes sound like an operetta and sometimes like an al fresco fiesta featuring saxophone, accordion and imaginative percussion. The Suite is actually a collection of incidental film music, some of which continues to serve in that function: one of the waltzes was used in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”.