CityLife

Houston Symphony: The Planets

The Planets: An HD Odyssey
Houston Symphony Orchestra
Bridgewater Hall
October 12, 2010

The Houston Symphony – an American orchestra with a distinguished history behind it – certainly had lift-off in pulling an audience to the Bridgewater Hall on Tuesday.

The idea of showing high-definition film of the real planets in the Solar System to the accompaniment of Holst’s The Planets suite brought a full house, which is music to anyone’s ears these days.

The film, created by Duncan Copp from images provided by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was awesome enough. Mars, perhaps not surprisingly, is the one where we have most footage to go on, but for every other planet given sonic form by Holst there were images and animations, with the music effectively writing the script.

Indeed, it, rather than the science, called the shots much of the time, with Venus appearing eerily beautiful despite the fact that (as we learned in the brief filmed introduction) it’s probably hell down there in reality.

The Houston Symphony has had to bring a big team across this particular planet to make a UK tour of the concert – that’s Holst’s fault for writing for so lavish an orchestra – and it has to be said that niceties of balance and phrasing were not at the forefront while the film was running.

But Hans Graf, its music director (who will be back in Manchester as a guest conductor of the Hallé next week) is too good a musician to give a purely mundane performance, and he brought calm nobility to the big Jupiter tune and a sense of growing horror to Saturn.

He had more opportunity to show off his American orchestra in the first part of the concert, opening with a sparkling Fireworks by Stravinsky. Whether John Adams’ Dr Atomic Symphony (an instrumental based on the opera about the first atom bomb test) was the right piece to follow it I’m not sure.

Its huge array of percussion noises kept the attention of the youngsters in the audience, but – despite an effective build-up of tension in the third part – it did not function very well as a demonstration of orchestral virtuosity, with some brass solos less than impressive and the faster sections failing to come over with the precision they need in an acoustic such as the Bridgewater Hall’s.

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