Jessica Cottis conducts The Planets: expansive, spine-tingling music inspired by stars, celestial spheres and the cosmos.

From ancient astronomers to NASA’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’, our place in the cosmos has captured imaginations since time immemorial. A storyteller’s inventory, this program draws on different knowledges to make meaning of the vastness of the universe.

LOGOS is a ‘musical Big Bang’, beginning with the breath and building to a dramatic orchestral climax.

Expansive and layered, this beguiling work by Danish–Australian-Dutch composer Benjamin de Murashkin reflects the order of mathematics and the mystery of the sublime, drawing inspiration from Tibetan music created to keep dark spiritual forces at bay.

An inventor, engineer and prolific composer, Josef Strauss, too, embraced rationality and creativity. His Music of the Spheres is a response to musica universalis: the philosophical idea that the stars and planets, suspended in perfect harmony, make their own music as they move across the heavens.

In The Planets, Gustav Holst personifies the celestial spheres, drawing on cosmic archetypes of astrology and Greek mythology. In the shadow of the Great War, he composed Mars and Venus, war and peace, before leading us from Mercury through Neptune, to the icy edges of the solar system – incorporating English folk melodies and dance rhythms along the way. The Planets ends, at the composer’s instruction, when ‘the sound is lost in the distance’.

Program:
Benjamin De Murashkin: LOGOS 

Josef Strauss: Music of the Spheres Waltzes, Op. 235
Gustav Holst: The Planets, Op. 32