Prom 32Holst’s The Planets

Part of the BBC Proms.The Planets: Holst’s colourful character portraits of our Solar System’s seven planets (excluding Earth) is by turns powerfully visceral and captivatingly luminous, opening with the war-like ‘Mars’ and concluding with Neptune, whose alluring sounds float off into the ether. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Jaime Martín present the suite alongside Welsh composer Grace Williams’s Violin Concerto. Suppressed by Williams for many years, it is an intensely lyrical work whose bittersweet opening gives way to an ecstatic slow movement – based on a Welsh hymn tune – and a joyful finale. The concert opens with Dora Pejacevic’s surging single gesture of an Overture, sumptuous textures married to bold, thrusting energy.