The Planets

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Gustav Holst recorded The Planets twice as a conductor, with the duration of the work coming in on either side of 43 minutes. Later conductors have taken it a good deal more slowly, and it is possible that Holst's quick tempos resulted from the need to reduce the number of 78 rpm records required. However, perhaps nobody has taken The Planets as slowly as Daniel Harding does here, leading the Chor und Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks; the album comes in at 56 minutes and 48 seconds. Harding's approach has two consequences. First, he tends to emphasize the work's mystical aspects. The military march sounds in the opening movement, "Mars, the Bringer of War," have less of the ferocity that audiences recently emerging from World War I must have found so compelling, but "Neptune, the Mystic," the finale, here achieves a near-Mahlerian transcendence. What makes it work is the superb playing of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, which steps up to the considerable challenges the work poses at this speed. The extensive brass writing, the string harmonies at the top of the fingerboard, the 18-player percussion section, and the wordless female chorus trailing off at the end: all are pristine. This is all the more impressive given that, aside from Herbert von Karajan, Holst's tone poem is not so often programmed in Germany. The last performance by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks took place more than 30 years earlier, and this complex score was surely unfamiliar to many of the musicians. The sonic clarity achieved by the engineers of the symphony's in-house BR Klassik label is superb. All in all, this is an entirely distinctive and beautifully executed reading of The Planets.

© James Manheim /TiVo