Holst The Planets

Description

The Planets is the most frequently performed piece of 20th century British music with immediate and lasting appeal to every kind of music-lover across every generation.

This high-profile live recording from 2006 was long overdue for the Berliner Philharmoniker who had not recorded The Planets since the legendary Karajan recording of 1981. Sir Simon Rattle had previously recorded another version of The Planets with the Philharmonia Orchestra, back in 1980, which was also hugely successful.

Contrary to popular opinion The Planets is not a typically English piece. Holsts eclectic musical world was inspired by his fascination with astrology (mythology and horoscopes), Sanskrit writings and his admiration for the works of his contemporaries particularly Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel and Scriabin.

A magisterial performance, closely attentive to detail, in which the continental influences are highlighted as never before The climax of Uranus is a thriller: a massive build-up, with the famous organ glissando not spotlighted but spreading a great cloud of atmospherics in its wake. Rattle also makes the best case yet for Colin Matthewss extra planet Pluto. BBC Music Magazine

Music as a means of intergalactic communication? Belief in music as a universal, cosmic language dates back to antiquity. The Baroque astronomer Johannes Kepler was still working within the same tradition; he calculated for the six planets then discovered tonal relations which express themselves in the harmony of a symphony of the worlds. Kepler did not know about Uranus and

Pluto, the only two planets in our solar system not visible from earth to the naked eye; it was not until 1781 that William Herschel spotted Uranus. Pluto, the outermost and smallest known planet, was sighted in 1930 by the American astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh. Gustav Holst thus learned four years before he died that his seven-part suite for orchestra The Planets Op.32 was in fact incomplete without Pluto. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) formally redefined the term planet to exclude dwarf planets such as Pluto. Many planetary astronomers, however, continue to consider Pluto and other dwarf planets to be planets.

At the time of the suites composition (1914-17), Holst discovered a penchant for the more metaphysical aspects of the heavenly bodies. His suite The Planets thus includes orchestral effects that were still unusual for British music at that time. In seven characteristic movements Holst presents the seven planets known to him (he omits the Earth) though not in their actual sequence. His musical journey through space leads from Mars first to the inner planets of Venus and Mercury and then to the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. This sequence corresponds to the seven ages of man (from childhood to old age) that are part of astrological thinking.

In addition to Holsts Planets, Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker recorded Pluto, the Renewer, a work by the British composer Colin Matthews intended as a continuation to The Planets.

How could I begin again, after the music has completely faded away as if into outer space?, the British composer Colin Matthews asked himself. It quickly became clear that it would be pointless to write a movement that was even more remote than Neptune unless the whole orchestra were to join the chorus off-stage. The only possible way to carry on from where Neptune leaves off is not to make a break at all, and so Pluto begins before Neptune has quite faded. And it is very fast faster even than Mercury: solar winds were my starting point. The movement soon took on an identity of its own, following a path which I seemed to be simply allowing to proceed as it would: in the process I came perhaps closer to Holst than I had expected, although at no point did I think to write pastiche. At the end the music disappears, almost as if Neptune had been quietly continuing in the background.