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Classical Music

Why The Symphony’s Unimaginative Visuals Reduce Holst’s The Planets to Background Music

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an occasional visual interpretation of a piece of concert music. The twentieth-century concept of music as a purely abstract, intellectual exercise, to be experienced by sitting motionless while exercising only the aural facilities, deserves reexamination from time to time. Furthermore, the long term survival of symphonic music in a rapidly changing world also demands innovation on the part of the people who present orchestral concerts, and the addition of visual effect is at least worthy of consideration now and then. That said, the initially promising concept of a visual accompaniment to Holst’s visionary symphonic suite The Planets, presented by the Dallas Symphony Thursday night with guest conductor Thomas Wilkins on the podium, proved utterly disappointing. Simply putting images on a screen and having someone describe those images between sections of a musical work isn’t the answer, and it isn’t art.
By Wayne Lee Gay |
Image

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an occasional visual interpretation of a piece of concert music. The twentieth-century concept of music as a purely abstract, intellectual exercise, to be experienced by sitting motionless while exercising only the aural facilities, deserves reexamination from time to time. Furthermore, the long term survival of symphonic music in a rapidly changing world also demands innovation on the part of the people who present orchestral concerts, and the addition of visual effect is at least worthy of consideration now and then.

That said, the initially promising concept of a visual accompaniment to Holst’s visionary symphonic suite The Planets, presented by the Dallas Symphony Thursday night with guest conductor Thomas Wilkins on the podium, proved utterly disappointing. Simply putting images on a screen and having someone describe those images between sections of a musical work isn’t the answer, and it isn’t art.

First of all, the underlying concept of presenting scientifically accurate images from the various planets depicted musically in Holst’s suite bears little relationship to Holst’s concept or to the score he created. Holst was inspired not by the actual orbiting bodies or by their actual physical characteristics (which were only vaguely conjectured in 1914, when he wrote The Planets), but by the tradition of the astrological influences of the planets, e.g., “Mars, the Bringer of War,” or “Venus, the Bringer of Peace.” Holst wisely produced a certain amount of deliberate ambiguity, so that the listener might be compelled to imagine on one hand the classic gods and goddesses for whom the planets are named, and, on the other, to consider the astronomical bodies in question—that’s part of the fun of listening to The Planets. Certainly, the twenty-first-century listener can hardly be blamed for thinking of the actual planets in their broad orbits  through space while experiencing Holst’s music—or, if he or she is so inclined, to recall the human-like deities of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

However, in this case, the projection of photographic images and computerized, animated visualizations of landscapes on the various planets was nearly totally devoid of any element of imagination, and of any reference beyond pure fact—reducing Holst’s skillfully wrought score to background music for a planetary travelogue. The only elements of visual artistry happened almost coincidentally, when, for instance, geological elements emerged as abstract design, or when the earlier photographic images from the earliest days were inherently wobbly, suggesting the unstable human element.

The spoken narration, though ably delivered by Quin Mathews, was even more pitifully lacking in meaning, imagination, or poetry. There is, indeed, poetry and drama in the violent epochal upheavals that brought about the formation of the solar system, and there is as much poetry also in the vividly imagined mythology that our poor, previously earthbound species created from its limited view of the specks of light in the night sky. But none of this was present in this dull exposition, capped by a scrap of warmed-over theism for an epilogue. All too often, the badly conceived narration distracted from and undermined Holst’s vision.

The concert had opened, in a clever cross-reference, with the “Music of the Spheres” Waltz by Johann Strauss, Jr.’s younger brother Josef. Like his older brother’s many waltzes, this worthy curtain-raiser displayed a gift, on the part of the composer, for gorgeous melody and rhythmic impetus, and a sense of the value of simple, proven orchestration technique. Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony followed and completed the first half of the program. The old question of why young Schubert left this work unfinished is clearly answered in the music itself, and in the remarkable serenity and completeness inherent in that monumental Andante.

Throughout the concert, conductor Wilkins seemed at times to hold an at best tentative command of the orchestra, which occasionally lapsed, under his baton, into uncharacteristic sloppiness. On the whole, what power and engagement emerged in the concert came from the music itself rather than from the conductor—and certainly not, in the case of The Planets, from the extraneous visual and verbal decorations.

Image via wikicommons and it not an actual rendering of the Dallas Symphony’s visualizations from the performance.

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