THE STORY

 

Tonight’s program is built on a remarkable coincidence: two

composers, working seventy years and an ocean apart, ended up telling

strikingly similar stories about the same corner of the universe.

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THE MUSIC

 

Gustav Holst wrote The Planets between 1914 and 1916, though

its real subject isn’t astronomy at all. Holst had recently discovered astrology

on a walking holiday in Spain, and became fascinated with the idea that each

planet carried its own personality: Mars aggressive and warlike, Venus serene

and peaceful, Jupiter bursting with frivolity. When it premiered in 1918, it made

the shy, reluctant Holst an overnight sensation he never fully came to enjoy.

Fast forward to 1977, and John Williams needed music for a very different

otherworldly story: a rebellion against an evil Empire, set in a galaxy far, far away.

When he needed a theme to embody pure menace, Williams drew from the same

well Holst had tapped six decades earlier. The result, the Imperial March, borrows

the militaristic bones of “Mars, the Bringer of War” almost wholesale.

Holst’s score calls for one of the largest orchestras in the standard repertoire,

including six horns and an organ, built to swing from Mars’s driving, mechanized

violence to Jupiter’s broad, big-hearted brass fanfares. Williams answers with

that same late-Romantic language of sweeping strings and blazing brass,

carrying the Imperial March’s menace and the swashbuckling wonder of the

main theme in a single evening

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THE MEANING

 

What makes tonight’s pairing so satisfying isn’t just the

historical connection. Both pieces are, at their core, about imagination

outrunning knowledge. Holst wasn’t a scientist mapping the solar system; he

was a mystic painting moods onto planets nobody had yet photographed up

close. Williams wasn’t scoring a documentary; he was building a mythology

from scratch. This program invites you to look up and out at the strange,

thrilling space between what we know and what we can only dream. It’s a

fitting way to open a season that, by its final concert, will bring us all the way

back down to earth, and into each other’s company.

From England to America, tonight’s program is entirely instrumental, built

on sweeping brass, driving percussion, and Holst’s wordless chorus to stir

wonder, adventure, and awe.