Daniel Harding conducts Holst’s “The Planets”
Daniel Harding undertakes a visionary musical journey through our solar system with Gustav Holst’s atmospheric orchestral suite The Planets. From rugged Mars to mystical Neptune, each planet has its own character. One work that Holst greatly admired was Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, which fluctuate between late Romanticism and Modernism. Brett Dean’s Komarov’s Fall was commissioned by the Philharmoniker in 2006 as a companion piece to Holst’s Planets.
The works of Schoenberg and Holst – both born in 1874 – were composed almost simultaneously during the First World War. From around 1908, Schoenberg had begun moving away from a late Romantic harmonic style to the realm of atonal or free-tonal music. In his opus 16, he tried out this new compositional style for the first time in a work for large orchestra. Schoenberg only decided on the associative rather than programmatic movement titles – Vorgefühle (Premonitions), Vergangenes (The Past), Farben (Summer Morning by a Lake: Chord-Colours, Peripetie (Peripeteia) and Das obbligate Rezitativ (The Obbligato Recitative) – after completing the composition, and at the request of his publisher.
When Holst began the work on his Planets Suite, he was studying the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, whose Second String Quartet includes a soprano singing “I feel air from another planet”. The originally planned title Seven Pieces for large Orchestra perhaps alludes to Schoenberg’s orchestral pieces, which Holst may have heard in London in 1912 or 1914. The two works are linked above all by the richness of their tonal colours. However, in contrast to Schoenberg, Holst remains committed to tonal order in his most famous work, which has influenced many film composers due to its almost “cosmic” imagery.
To coincide with their performance of Holst’s Planets in 2006, the Berliner Philharmoniker commissioned four works – one of which, Brett Dean’s study Komarov’s Fall, will be performed again at this concert. A former violist with the Philharmoniker, Dean was inspired to write the work by the story of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who died during a Soviet space mission in 1967.
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