Prom 33 – Holst’s The Planets

Part of the BBC Proms.

From broad visions of the universe to the intimacy of human relationships, the wonder of creation to the fragile moment of death, Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus take us through it all. Human loss is at the heart both of Strauss’s tender, rapturous tone-poem Death and Transfiguration – an orchestral portrait of ‘the dying hours of a man’ – and of Matthew Kaner’s Pearl, a lament whose medieval text sees a grieving father glimpsing his daughter in the afterlife. Holst’s The Planets leaves Earth far behind in its vivid, myth-inspired journey through our solar system in all its mysterious beauty.