Powerful classical music is the route to take to get pumped. Forget metal, forget punk, forget crunk, forget techno. Forget all of it and surround yourself with The Planets. It’s almost hard for me to sit down and really fully audition this because I instantly want to form a militia and invade Canada. Invade them with comet cannons and gamma blasters. Just explode the hell out of them, Intergalactic Style.
And then Sir Adrian Boult made me realize how stupid that idea is with his wise words posted below. He told me war is stupid and worthless. It produces nothing but gooey flesh masses, orphaned babes, and really pissed off future-terrorists. And besides, who really wants Canada anyway?
Below is a technical description of the album by the conductor , Sir Adrian Boult. Enjoy
The seven movements of this Suite last for almost an hour in performance. It must be re-affirmed also that the message of each movement can only be sought in the astrological significance of each Planet–it has nothing to do with mythology, and any though of the personalities of the Greek deities can only lead to misunderstanding of the purpose of the music. Holst has given a sub-title to each with can help us more than anything else.
The work is laid out for a very large orchestra: 2 piccolos, 4 flutes, bass flute, 3 oboes, cor anglais, bass oboe, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, double bassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tenor tuba, bass tuba, 2 harps, celesta, a large contingent of percussion, organ and strings. In the last movement there is also a small 6-part female chorus.
1. Mars, The Bringer of War
It is worth remembering that the composer wrote this in the summer of 1914 and so had no experience of what it describes.
A vigorous rhythmical figure permeates the whole movement against the subjects in longer notes which come and go; it is heard even in the slow middle section, as is the first the side drum and then the trumpets and other instruments remind us of it in every bar. The piece lasts seven minutes and is planned on a broad ABA basis, al three sections rising to a climax, the second of which plunges us into the return of the main figure, fff, in a crashing unison of the whole orchestra.
I will remember the composer’s insistence on the stupidity of war as well as all its other horrors, and I feel that the movement can easily be played so fast that it becomes too restless and energetic and loses some of its relentless, brutal, and stupid power.
2. Venus, The Bringer of Peace
Nine minutes of beauty act as a wonderful contrast to the shattering music we have just heard. Pease is expressed here by means of several different figures, first calm, then more active, and finally very slow and quiet. The movement closes with a rich amplification of the opening.
3. Mercury, The Winged Messenger
Host has here succeeded in making the orchestra give us a perfect impression of winged lightness and speed. The heavier instruments are, of course, silent, even in the central section (where we have eleven and a half repetitions of a six-bar phrase piling up to the only climax and receding) and we find that almost every bar is in two keys at once. The music swings rapidly between chords that are almost as distant from each other as is harmonically possible; from this comes a wonderful sense of elusiveness as of quicksilver throughout its four minutes.
4. Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity
Holst had a Falstaffian sense of Humour, and I can remember his description of Jupiter: “one of those jolly fat people who enjoy life”. There is no doubt about the fun of Jupiter, and its eight minutes radiate happiness. For those who like to see the construction of their music, Jupiter has a number of subjects, though they all achieve their balance finally. ABACABA might perhaps be a rough scheme, though at first A and the third have two distinct sections in them, and the final repeat is quite overshadowed by a powerful reference to C. Miss Imogen Holst has warned us against linking the slow middle section, C, with the patriotic words with which it was later associated. The Tune as it stands reflects the good humour of Jupiter, no more, no less.
5. Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age
Miss Holst says that her father was fond of this movement. He might well be–nowhere is music of greater penetration to be found. The movement’s nine minutes began with a moving picture of the sorrows of slow and gloomy figure from the string basses. This grows into a march-like tune in the brass, four flutes go on with the march in slower time–again the trumpets take over and lead us to a terrible climax ith brazen bells in addition. This subsides for a few bars and we suddenly feel that the Sun is pushing through the clouds. The basses play again their opening figure, but subtly transformed to show us how beautiful and peaceful old age can be after all. Quiet trombones, strings and organs all take up the message and the movement ends with calm perfection.
6. Uranus, The Magician
It is interesting that staccato bassoons seem so exactly to reflect the spirit of a magician. One things of Dukas’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and Host’s “Uranus” as the most obvious examples and it is worth nothing that Holst, who came second, had never heard Duka’s work, or even seen the Score, when he wrote “Uranus”. The bassoons start their exercises after three forcible repetitions of a four-note figure which permeates the movement, assailing us sometimes form the bass department, sometimes from the drums, and sometimes from the piccolo. Three bassoons then take over, the most of the orchestra joins in gradually until a rollicking unison tune comes in all the strings. The music is held up for a moment, and after a loud band on the big drum the four-note figure takes on the rhythm of the bassoons’ dance, and by a magical transformation suddenly becomes the background of a new tun on the tubas. This works up to one of Holst’s supreme tuttis, and a glissando scale on the full organ casts a spell of sudden silence over the whole picture. Harps suggest the four-note figure, another stream from everybody follows, and this chord, reduced to nothing, changes colour several times as a magician might, and the notes ppp bring us back to silence after six minutes of magical fun.
7. Neptune, The Mystic
In this final movement every instrument is directed to play pianissimo throughout, and the tone is to be “dead”, except for one moment near the end, when the clarinet plays a succession of notes which might almost b e called a tune in this otherwise tuneless, expressionless, shapeless succession of cloudy harmonies, suggesting as it does in infinite vision of timeless eternity. We spoke of the end but this is inaccurate, for if it is possible for a piece of music never finish, this is what happens here. A slow, irregular swing between two distant chords fills nearly every bar of the 3+2 metre, and imperceptibly we become conscious that female voices have joined the orchestra. Soon the instruments gradually melt away, and the voices carry on with the two swaying chords, whose diminuendo is prolonged until we wonder whether we still hear them or only hold them in our memory, swinging backward and forward for all time.
