Gustav holst’s homestead ”the Planets” from 1916 is the most stunning of English orchestral music. Colourful, imaginative and cinematic features holst’s homestead scores lent itself to innumerable contexts and arrangements – not least for the symphonic and metal bands. Anything Holst himself, of course, did not come to experience, and he had done it, he had not liked it.
Gustav Holst dismissed the apparent success of his work. Actually, he had planned to call it ”Seven pieces for large orchestra”, influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, until a friend made him interested in astrology.
Yet several of the kits are a complete cosmic character that fascinates even today. To the extent you get to hear them in concert.
To the popular ”the Planets” so rarely appears live must depend on a single thing: the sublime, the transcendent end with ”Neptune – the mystic”. For this there is a crowd of wordless female voices in the distance in an intonation so fragile that the slightest flutter can lower the whole work.
with the Swedish radio choir’s ladies, who thankfully is able to realise holst’s homestead klangutopi of infinite space. Equally visionary was not the whole picture: the sensually sweet ”Venus” a little bit edgy, the martial ”March” more of the tin soldiers on the march than threatening brutal.
Andrew Manze is not the most epic, dramatic among the conductors, but he had also made appearances on short notice. However, he said for the finely-detailed with the Swedish radio symphony orchestra in Mozart’s last piano concerto; in fact, more textured and interesting than solistens bet. Paul Lewis delivered a moderately romantic but impersonal reading, and abstained from their own approach in kadenserna.
As an additional planet, that is to say, Energy that is missing from Holst, premiered Katarina Leymans ”Undulating Blue”. Inspired by our blue planet with its life-giving water, she has created a beautiful klangstudie with depth effect. Long, heavy swells opens and closes a fine orchestral music, which only had a little higher concentration and salinity.
