Free | No ticket required
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Oriol Sans, conductor
Sebastian Jimenez, graduate student conductor

Pre-concert talk starts at 7 pm
With special guest Eric Wilcots
Dean of the College of Letters & Science, and the Mary C. Jacoby Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Astronomy 

Program: Debussy: Clair de lune; Bates: The B-Sides; Holst: The Planets

Mars and Jupiter from Gustav Holsts’s titanic symphonic composition The Planets reign among the most recognizable orchestral works ever written. Inspired by astrology, rather than astronomy, each movement is a colorful orchestral miniature that identifies and heralds our deep human behaviors related to each of the planets.

In the first half of the concert, the Symphony Orchestra will perform two pieces that also have cosmological connections, even if only in titles. The first one is an orchestral arrangement of Claude Debussy’s infamous and delicate Clair de lune. It was originally a movement from his Suite Bergamasque for piano, inspired by Paul Verlain’s poem of the same title. The second one is The B-Sides, a suite of five movements by Mason Bates that he describes as “brief landings on a variety of peculiar planets.” One of the movements titled Gemini in the Solar Wind is a re-imagination of the first American spacewalk. Among the orchestral textures, audiences can hear NASA communication samples from the 1965 Gemini IV voyage.