Reach for the stars! Holst's The Planets | Havant Symphony Orchestra

The last concert of our season delivers two works you may not have heard and one that you almost certainly have!

Gustav Holst’s suite ‘The Planets’ features at number 15 in the Classic FM Ultimate Hall of Fame and is a huge and very memorable work for so many reasons. Holst intended to portray astrological aspects of the planets rather than astronomical details and he therefore didn’t include Earth. Pluto is also excluded as it hadn’t been discovered yet (and nowadays its planetary status is disputed anyway!). Each movement is so different, ranging from Mars, the Bringer of War to Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. The last movement involves a small, offstage, choir of female voices taking us off into the distance beyond Neptune.

Our less familiar offerings are another English work, Brigg Fair by Delius, and something completely different, the Piano Concerto by the Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian. Delius wrote Brigg Fair in 1908 as a set of variations based on an English folk song of Lincolnshire origin. Although Khachaturian also makes use of folk song in his Piano Concerto, written in 1936, this is an altogether different sound-world to the Delius. Vibrant and exciting, it uses a slightly smaller orchestra than the Delius, but makes a lot more noise!