“Earth’s celestial neighbors won’t feel quite so far away this weekend,” writes Lawrence Elizabeth Knox in Monday’s (12/2) Houston Chronicle. “Beginning Thursday, the Houston Symphony, led by music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada, will take the city to the stars … with the world premiere of ‘Ad Astra’ by Jimmy López Bellido. In the five-movement work, the Peruvian composer provides an overview of the most iconic milestones that NASA has achieved in terms of space exploration.… López, who is in his third and final year as the Houston Symphony’s composer-in-residence, begins ‘Ad Astra’ with a musical interpretation of the Voyager program and its two space probes … launched in 1977…. The rhythm of ‘per aspera ad astra,’ meaning ‘through difficulties to the stars,’ became the building block of his entire symphony, which depicts the Apollo program with the inimitable sound of the rarely used glass harmonica before referencing the shaky beginnings of the Hubble Space Telescope [before tackling] one of NASA’s worst tragedies—the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and all seven crew members on board, one of whom was a high school teacher, on Jan. 28, 1986.”
Posted December 3, 2019
