“The Tucson Symphony Orchestra is taking us to a galaxy far, far away this weekend,” writes Cathalena Burch in Thursday’s (10/20) Arizona Daily Star. “The orchestra is mounting The Planets on the Big Screen, an adaptation of Adrian M. Wyard’s multimedia concert The Planets Live centered around Gustav Holst’s 100-year-old masterwork The Planets [led by] guest conductor Mei-Ann Chen, music director … of the Chicago Sinfonietta…. A key aspect of the program comes from … work spearheaded by the University of Arizona’s Peter Smith, a principal investigator and project leader on the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory…. The women of the TSO Chorus are making their season debut in the ‘Neptune’ movement [in which] their voices fade off so that the audience cannot distinguish between silence and sound, allowing you to imagine yourself somewhere in the galaxy.” Also on the program are William Walton’s Wise Virgins Suite and Michael Gandolfi’s “The Universe Cascade” from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, which Gandolfi based “on an actual garden in Scotland that he opens to the public one day a year…. Chen described the seven-minute piece as a musical summary of the big bang, with Gandolfi quoting everything from Gregorian chants to contemporary compositions.”
Posted October 20, 2016
