Please don't be put off by the appearance of the word "Fugal" in the title of this lovely concerto. This is not a dry or academic piece at all. This short work (eight and a half minutes) is one of the prettiest, most heartwarming works by Gustav Holst, known to most music-lovers only for his huge and powerful orchestral suite The Planets.

Composing had actually been a painful process for him for some years due to the neuritis that crippled his hands (it had forced him to give up piano in favor of trombone years earlier). Holst's difficulty in writing, as well as his feeling that he had submerged his own personality beneath the huge orchestral machinery of The Planets, led him in the early 1920s to try smaller combinations of instruments that didn't require so many notes, and to attempt to find a more intimate, personal style.

The two works with "fugal" in the title, A Fugal Overture, Op. 40, No. 1, and this work are one part of this search. The rather strict form of the fugue offers composers a chance to see what they can achieve in a very disciplined format that demands complete mastery of counterpoint. Even in the High Baroque many people were put off by the word "fugue," and called it an example of "learned counterpoint," often meaning dry or pedantic. In terms of musical history, both works represent Holst's response to the brand-new, post-World War I European style of neo-Classicism.

The Fugal Concerto firmly contradicts the idea that fugues have to reek of the academy. Above all, Holst finds lovely flowing melodies that are also first-rate fugue subjects. The first movement has a running quality, with quicksilver tradeoffs among the orchestra and the two soloists. The second movement is essentially a canon for the two soloists, sharing a plaintive melody. The lovely middle sections admits the viola section as a third voice in canonic writing. It leads directly to a joyful concluding movement in a very English 6/8 dancing rhythm. In the middle there is a simultaneous cadenza for flute and oboe, leading to introduction of an English folk song called "If all the World were Paper." This tune sticks around as the main rhythmic tune returns, making the last part of the finale, in fact, a double fugue with breathless, propulsive rhythms.

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