There are so many recordings, not to mention live performances of Gustav Holst’s The Planets that you wonder why an orchestra would bother to release a new version (the current catalogue contains well over 80!). And yet there’s something fresh and irresistible about this London Symphony Orchestra album, recorded live (with patches) in 2024 under Music Director Antonio Pappano. Not only that, it’s coupled with Arnold Bax’s swashbuckling Tintagel, a work fully deserving of British national treasure status and yet inexplicably a relative stranger to concert programs.

Holst couldn’t have chosen a less propitious time to compose The Planets, starting the work in 1914 as his country went to war and completing it in 1917 when there was little enthusiasm for new music. With a significant proportion of the population either recently dead or about to die, musicians for such an ambitious work were thin on the ground. His luck was in, however, for composer and promoter of contemporary music Balfour Gardiner leapt at the chance to put it on, arranging for the young Adrian Boult...