Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 4pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in September are: 2-6 September Bruckner 9-13 September Schoenberg 16-20 September Gustav Holst 23-27 September Gluck 30 Sept – 4 Oct Dorothy Howell
‘I’m not really a composer,’ Imogen Holst declared when she went on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs in 1972. Even when pressed, she gave the impression that she knew very little about music at all. She lamented that she was ‘really not very bright I’m afraid’, especially at school, and of her time at the newly formed Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts in World War II, when she travelled across the country promoting community music-making, she had little to say except that she had been one of a group of ‘missionary-minded spinsters’.
She had worked with Britten for years as an amanuensis – although ‘amanuensis’ doesn’t fully communicate the extent of the creative support that she offered the composer – a period she described as ‘the most wonderful experience in learning about music’. When asked which of her.
