Gustav Holst's composition, Evening-Watch is an interesting example of his later choral work. This short piece for solo tenor and alto with accompanying choir is a setting of "A Dialogue" from Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans of 1650. Written in 1924 as a conversation between the Body and the Soul during the shift from wakefulness to sleep, this work has a rather surreal quality. First performed at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral in 1925, Holst originally intended that Evening-Watch be the first of two motets but the austere harmonies of this piece were not well received by English audiences and the second motet was never written.

The Body's opening statement, "Farewell! I go to sleep." is expressed in the plainsong style of the tenor solo. The chorus, playing the part of the Soul, answers in a hauntingly dissonant chordal style reminiscent of the choral works of Benjamin Britten. Eloquently expressed in the lyrics, "My soul has naught but fire and ice" the almost cold dissonance of this work is the result of it being built on parallel movement in fourths in the choral line and the plaintive, wandering musical lines of the solo voices. The final words, "Man's eternal Prime" have a lush choral setting which gives a feeling of the eternal to the grand climax of this composition. Haunting and stark, Holst's Evening-Watch is a work that is clearly ahead of its time. With its dissonant harmonies and the unusual subject matter of its lyrics, this composition is better suited to the tastes of late twentieth-century audiences than those of the 1920s and should not be overlooked in Holst's body of work.

© Corie Stanton Root, Rovi