The Planets 2018 / Chronicle of Ligeti Quartet – Holst Orbits in the Modern Era | The music

WWhen Gustav Holst wrote his sequel Planets a century ago, the components of the solar system were little known: each of his planetary portraits was more inspired by astrology and Roman mythology than by astronomy. For example, composer Samuel Bordoli, artistic director of this touring project, decided to celebrate the centenary of Holst's sequel by asking eight contemporary composers to write new works for a string quartet. system.

Each composer was mentored by astronomers, geologists and physicists, who used space probes and interplanetary data to familiarize them with the planet they are writing on. While Holst considered Mars a "war bearer" and Venus as "a bearer of peace," scientists now know that Mars is a rather serene planet, while Venus has one of the most turbulent climates in the solar system. Thus, the song for Deborah Pritchard for Mars is a cold and majestic series of broken and diminished chords, while the piece of Shiva Feshareki for Venus is a thrash to an absolutely brutal and semi-improvised chord.

This is a new staging: the audience sits in slanted seats, watching the images of each planet projected on the planetarium dome with the four members of the Ligeti Quartet spread across the four corners of the auditorium. A recurring theme in many works is the tension between order and chaos: Yazz Ahmed's theme for Saturn lies between broken chords and arrhythmic explorations of pizzicato, while Mira Calix for Mercury transforms the raw data of the planet surface in a series of strident and nested atonal sentences in waltz time.

There are some strong themes here: The Land of Ayanna Witter-Johnson is a heartwarming cycle of warm, aquatic and aquatic chords, and the piece of Laurence Crane for Neptune, cold and mysterious, is a wonderfully piece iced minimalism of Aphex Twin. quarter drones. But generally, it's more like illustrative film music: every room is full of textural details, the musical analogue of sulfur swamps, ice storms and metallic hydrogen clouds that characterize our solar system.