Comparison recordings:
The Planets: Atherton, Bernstein, Boult, Boult, Boult, Holst, Karajan, Karajan,
Lloyd-Jones, Mehta, Previn, Sargent, Slatkin, Solti, Steinberg,
Stokowski, Stokowski, Susskind.
Pluto: Atherton/BBCNOW
This magnificent work
-
The Planets - remains fresh forever and can be listened
to over and over without wearing out, comparable in this quality
only to Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade***.
Holst borrowed generously from Beethoven, Haydn, Wagner, Debussy,
Liszt, Bruckner, Elgar, Sibelius and Rossini, merging these
influences with consummate skill to create a sense of grandeur and
universality. This is one of the earliest and most successful
works to treat a large orchestra as a collection of small
ensembles, with percussion, the harp, and certain repeated
rhythmic figures unifying the movements into the perception of a
whole. Holst has captured
perfectly the fascination of astrology with its grand vision
of heavenly phenomena on the hugest scale mirrored in the everyday
activities of human beings.
This new recording, one
of the finest on CD, technically approaches the standard of the
(two channel) SACD in realism. Perhaps you remember from
a previous review my listing of my
'dream Planets':
Mars - Bernstein, NYPO
Venus
-
Karajan, VPO
Mercury
- Boult, LPO
(1954)
Jupiter
-
Boult, LPO (1954)
Saturn
-
Previn, LSO
Uranus
-
Boult, LPO (1954)
Neptune
-
Boult, LPO (1954)
Pluto
-
Atherton, BBCNOW
Does Rattle displace any
of those? Not quite, although his Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, and Pluto are excellent. On the first
hearing I found Rattle's opening tempo in Uranus just
a trifle slow, but it soon became clear that this was just what
is required here.
Recorded sound is exemplary,
showing significant recent advances in original recording and
CD mastering techniques, and Rattle makes full use of the available
dynamic range, especially in Uranus where the famous
decrescendo truly goes from the painful to the barely
audible. However, I could have used just a trifle more deep bass
at a few spots. The brass and percussion sections are
spread out along the back of the orchestra which enlivens the
texture; this is done electronically, as the video shows the
orchestra in normal seating arrangement.
Six months after this recording
was made, the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague
declared that Pluto is no longer to be classified as a
'planet'. Do we now have to
remove Pluto from this list and never play Colin Matthews' piece again as one
critic suggested? Certainly not. In the first place, Holst was
writing about astrology, not astronomy, and whatever the IAU
says would have no application.
Eminent British astrologer and father of modern astrology, Alan
Leo,**** provided Holst with the subtitles of the movements
from his book What is a Horoscope? Matthews studied
the astrological personality of Pluto before composing his work. Secondly, I like the
piece and think it works very well with the other pieces.*****
Clearly Rattle agrees with me, as he took the initiative to
commission the music of these several asteroids to join Pluto.
Are these asteroid pieces
any good, good enough to become permanent members of our musical
solar system? Toutatis sounds a lot like Pluto,
but less mystical, more extroverted. Osiris is at once
startling in its daring use of orchestral sonority, and echoes
Pierre Henry, Pierre Boulez and Webern in its texture, with more
than a taste of Britten and Colin Matthews here and there.
It's rather clamorous, actually; I don't think Osiris would
be pleased; I wouldn't want to be in Pintscher's shoes when he finally
gets to the Land of the Duat. Ceres is more euphonious,
opening with distant thunder suggesting the dual role of the
Goddess as Queen of the Underworld, as well as Bringer of Spring
signaled by polytonal brass fanfares and pregnant winds. Alas, in the end duty calls; the Queen returns to her
dark realm and the drums of Winter are with us once again.
Komarov is a tribute
to Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov the first human to die in
space, upon re-entry from orbit in 1971, after whom the asteroid
1836 was
consequently named. The piece begins very tentatively
with distant bird-like sounds which are intended to describe
the loneliness of space and suggest the sound of electronic
telemetry. It then moves far away from the valedictory mood
into a noisy, jazzy parody of Britten's
'Sunday Morning' which
rises to a roar, then fades abruptly to the silent sounds of
the opening of the piece.
All of these, including
Pluto, are definitely modern in texture and make no attempt
to reproduce Holst's late-romantic tonal
orchestral universe.
In order of their musical merit, I rate Pluto first,
followed by Ceres, Komarov, Osiris and
Toutatis. It is unlikely that they will all routinely
be added to The Planets, but the first couple just might
be heard often enough.
Disk two, an
'enhanced CD' plays the audio tracks
normally on every CD player I tested it on, including my
notoriously touchy Emerson portable. A DVD player sees this disk
precisely as a CD and only plays the audio tracks, not the
video. Only if you have a computer with a CD drive, and have
Apple QuickTime installed, can you watch the video. A DVD drive
on your computer is not required. If, like me, you find that
Apple QuickTime behaves like a virus on your Windows computer,
you can download a specially de-fanged version of QuickTime from
a Russian hacker site. The video track would not play at all on
my 400 MHz Windows 98 Pentium II computer - the notes say 500
MHz Pentium III or above is required - but played easily on my
2.4GHz Windows 2000 computer.
Although I have autoplay turned off, the disk kept autoplaying
anyway, and didn't want to be stopped. I recommend physically
removing it from your drive as soon as the program quits playing,
and you still may have to go into Task Manager to get rid of
the program.
The video program naturally
features a talking head of Sir Simon explaining that he discussed
the very first performance of The Planets with its
creator Sir Adrian Boult. He relates that the work is not well
known in Berlin although it is very popular throughout
Scandinavia and the English-speaking world. It was Rattle's idea to commission the
four modern asteroid pieces, and each is introduced on video by
the composer, Ms. Saariaho by means of still photos and a
voice-over. All the composers
- except Dean
- said they were reacting
to the fear of asteroid collision even though in only one case
is the asteroid one that is at all likely to collide with earth.
The video track therefore erupted with computer syntheses of
stellar explosions and moving asteroids. Dean
said it was hearing a chilling recording of Komarov's last words
broadcast from space that inspired him to write the tribute
to him, imagining in the lyrical middle section Komarov's wife's
unrecorded farewell over the radio just before her husband's orbiting capsule burned
up. Like most
'making of' documentaries,
I rate this as worth only a once-through, although I always
do like watching orchestras at work and we get a few brief clips
of the BPO working on Mars.
EMI is to be praised for
continuing to experiment with the DVD-Audio and Enhanced CD
formats and I hope they benefit from this in the marketplace
as they surely deserve to.
Paul Shoemaker
*Commissioned by the Sir Simon Rattle and Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra.
Pluto was commissioned by the Hallé Orchestra.
**Not
including video tracks.
*** Rimsky-Korsakov triumphed
by building on the balletic musical phrasing of Tchaikovsky
and the work
'La Mer' by Glazunov, linking the motion of the
dancer's body with the watery
movement of the sea, as well as his own operatic instincts. His own emotional involvement with
the oceans of the world derived from his experience in the Tsarist
Navy from which he was honorably retired.
**** William Frederick
Allan
[sic], born Westminster,
7 August 1860, died Bude, 30 August 1917. Astrologers even in
that enlightened age avoided using their real names in public
lest reprisals be taken against them.
Even so, Alan Leo was twice hauled into the dock for fortune
telling, once fined
£25, but he persevered and
we astrologers today are in his debt. Not surprisingly, Leo was his rising
sign.
***** I often play the
'Sanctus' out of the Requiem by Duruflé
, in the full
choral and orchestral version, as a Pluto when I play
The Planets for friends.
Rundfunkchor
Berlin/Robin Gritton 
