Imogen Holst Exhibition at High Cross House on 2pm-4:30pm, Tuesday to Friday afternoons until 26th of October, with the addition of Tuesday to Friday 10:30am-12:30pm from the 24 July to the 31 August. It will also open Sat 8 September 10am-12:30pm and 2pm-4:30pm as part of the heritage open days weekend.
Visit the architectural gem High Cross House, on the Dartington Hall estate and you will find displayed the original manuscript of Imogen Holst’s String Quartet No 1, music that recently featured on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Composers of the Week’. A highly regarded choral conductor, both she and her father, composer Gustav Holst, were celebrated during Easter week on the lunchtime radio programme, which commemorated the centenary of Imogen’s birth. Dartington, where she taught music to a succession of students, celebrates the centenary too with an exhibition of original documents, text and photographs derived from The Dartington Hall Trust Archive.
Imogen dedicated the manuscript of the String Quartet No 1 to Dartington Hall Trust founders, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, who in 1942 invited her to spend time at Dartington. She had been working as one of six music travellers for C.E.M.A. (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), who were appointed to foster amateur music-making in wartime rural England with the whole of the South West as her responsibility. Benjamin Britten was a regular visitor to Dartington and after nine years of teaching, she accepted the celebrated composer’s invitation to take up a post at Aldeburgh as his music assistant.
Imogen Holst believed in her father’s maxim that music should be done by anyone keen and enthusiastic enough to want to take it up, regardless of ability. One of her Dartington students later recalled how ‘occasionally the Friday Evening Singers, some of them marvellously unprofessional, would be rewarded for their efforts by Imo’s delighted remark, “J S B himself walked in!”’ She was able to get a wide range of ordinary people to listen, play and sing.
Other recollections from students illustrate her passion for Bach and her dislike of Chopin. “The music she didn’t like I didn’t learn,” one Dartington student recalled later in life. Her students worked hard and long on Bach’s B Minor Mass, to her ‘the greatest music in the world’, according to one. The ‘St John Passion’ involved all students and staff alike in the emotional wear and tear of detailed work and study; even the lengths of the pauses between sections were musically organised.
Whilst at Dartington, Imogen Holst spent two months in West Bengal, Northern India at Santiniketan University, founded by the philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom Leonard Elmhirst had worked prior to the purchase of Dartington Hall in 1925. There she met a great singing teacher who to her delight looked exactly like Bach: he wore his hair in long silver-white ringlets.
High Cross House, a superb example of International Modernism, was built for the headmaster of the famous Dartington Hall School and designed by Swiss American architect William Lescaze. It is furnished of the period and includes pieces by Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, Gerald Summers and Lescaze, as well as furniture made at Dartington in the modern idiom. Items from the Trust’s Collection of significant ceramics and paintings are on display and there is a second exhibition illustrating the history of The Dartington Hall Trust from 1925 to the present day.
The house is currently open to the public on Tuesday to Friday afternoons until the end of October, with the addition of Tuesday to Friday mornings from the 24 July to the 31 August.
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The Dartington Hall Trust is a registered charity no. 279756. Company no. 1485560. Registered Office: The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL United Kingdom. Telephone 01803 847000; Fax 01803 847007;