When Gustav Holst wrote his Planets suite a century ago, little was known about the components of the solar system: each of his planetary portraits was inspired more by astrology and Roman mythology than by astronomy. So composer Samuel Bordoli, the artistic director of this touring project, decided to celebrate the centenary of Holst’s suite by asking eight contemporary composers to write new works for a string quartet – this time informed by the vast discoveries that have since been made about the solar system.
Each composer has been mentored by astronomers, geologists and physicists, who have used space probes and interplanetary data to introduce them to the planet they are writing about. Where Holst painted Mars as the “bringer of war” and Venus as the “bringer of peace”, scientists now know Mars to be a rather serene planet, while Venus has one of the solar system’s most turbulent climates. So Deborah Pritchard’s piece for Mars is a cold and stately series of broken, diminished chords, while Shiva Feshareki’s piece for Venus is an absolutely brutal, semi-improvised one-chord thrash.
It is a novel piece of staging: the audience sits in reclining seats, staring up at images of each planet projected on to the planetarium’s dome with the four members of the Ligeti Quartet split between the four corners of the auditorium. A recurring theme in many of the works is the tension between order and chaos: Yazz Ahmed’s theme for Saturn lurches between spiky broken chords and arrhythmic pizzicato explorations, while Mira Calix’s piece for Mercury turns raw data from the planet’s rocky, pock-marked, volcanic surface into a series of strident and interlocking atonal phrases in waltz time.
There are a few strong themes here: Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Earth is a comforting cycle of warm, woozy, aqueous chords, and Laurence Crane’s piece for the cold, mysterious Neptune is a wonderfully icy piece of Aphex Twin-style minimalism based around a series of drones in fourths. But generally this is more like illustrative film music: each piece fizzes with textural detail, the musical analogue of the sulphuric swamps, ice storms and metallic hydrogen clouds that characterise our solar system.
At We the Curious, Bristol, 1 October. Then touring.
