Description
World Premiere recording - 2CD set including separate 120-page book with full libretto, essays, composer profile and artist biographies. Gustav Holst - along with Elgar, Britten and Vaughan Williams - is one of the most famous and best-loved of British composers and his Planets suite is one of the greatest orchestral works written in the twentieth century. It therefore almost beggars belief that Sita, Holst's operatic masterpiece and the largest-scale work he ever composed had not been published, recorded or even performed until 2024. All that changed when a German opera company - the Saarbrucken Staatstheater - undertook the mammoth task of transcribing and setting the manuscript and staging the work; and we at EM Records are absolutely delighted and proud to announce the World Premiere recording of this magnificent and captivating work, in collaboration with the Staatstheater. Sita took Holst seven years to compose, from 1899 to 1906, and is a substantial three-act opera based on the Hindu epic The Ramayana, telling the dramatic story of Sita's abduction by the Demon King Ravana and the heroic efforts of Rama and his brother Lakshman to defeat the demon army and rescue her. While showing influences of Wagner and even, at times, Verdi and Mahler, it nevertheless has distinctively Holstian fingerprints, with tantalising foreshadowings of The Planets and it is a deeply moving and thrilling opera of immense beauty, poignancy and tenderness.
