ERSO “Planets”

The Planets – an HD Odyssey, a collaboration between Duncan Copp, a director known for many films on or about space, and the NASA, will be shown with Gustav Holst’s magnum opus The Planets, providing the audience with a spectacular performance based on the latest discoveries in space.
With their lavish orchestration and memorable melodies, the musical portraits of planets created by Holst have fascinated audiences for over a century. In addition to its success on concert stages, his music has been featured on countless Hollywood film soundtracks.

After the premiere of one of Holst and Copp’s collaborative pieces, The New York Times wrote: “Photographs from rovers and satellites, radar images and ­computer-generated graphics were combined to give the audience the impression of circling individual planets and sometimes ­flying over their awesomely barren landscapes…”. British newspaper The Scotsman called this symbiosis of music and film, this multimedia mix “a marriage made in heaven”.

The first part of the concert is dedicated to one of the masters of British music, Benjamin Britten. Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, composed for string orchestra and bell, is one of the first works ever written by Arvo Pärt in the tintinnabuli style. Britten wrote his famous The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra for the London Symphony Orchestra’s educational documentary Instruments of the Orchestra with the aim of teaching young people to listen and notice different instruments and groups of instruments within a symphony orchestra.

The orchestra will be conducted by ENSO’s former principal conductor Nikolai Alexeev, who has been working closely with the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra for years and in addition to conducting all of the major symphony orchestras of Moscow and St Petersburg, has also conducted numerous orchestras outside Russia and given concerts in Europe, Japan and the United States.