Universal Appeal
Projection screens and satellite footage give a new dimension to Holst’s “Planets”

What: Kronos + Cosmos
Location: Brooklyn Academy of Music
Date: 4/21/2007
Cost: $17 (with a discount from Science in the City)
Bohemian Factor: healthy
Geek Factor: yes, but glamorous and assimilated (This IS BAM after all)

Was it just last month that I was shooting my mouth off, cautioning against science and art being forced together under the umbrella of an artificial gimmick?

Well, it’s not the first time Arcadia gets to eat her words.

When the Brooklyn Philharmonic performed Gustave Holst’s The Planets with NASA footage of each corresponding planet in the background, I had to admit this is kind of cool.

As part of a program called “Kronos + Cosmos” featuring the Kronos Quartet, the orchestra used the second half of the program to display, on a projection screen, sweeping montages of icy canyons, volcanic mountain ranges, and deceptively-benign looking multicolored clouds. The evening’s narrator was all too game for heightening the astronomy-romantic in all of us, reciting Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and anyone else whose ever quipped a bot mot about the universe, or the very figures from Greek mythology who share their nomenclature with planets.

Following each lyrical paean to humanity, infinity, or some other poetic abstraction, the audience would be reminded that the stunning imagery on the screen was, in fact, swirling tempests of atmospheric goo that would probably kill any of us in nanoseconds after inhaling an overdose of one of the far corners of the periodic table. And even though our brains have already been pre-wired by Hollywood to see some kind of drama, or at least Captain Kirk, with space imagery, the presentation stuck strictly to the satellite footage, a wise choice.

When I did, in fact, roll my eyes, at the supertitles (e.g. “Mars: The Bringer of War”; “Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity”) I realized this was not the Brooklyn Phil’s doing; but the titles bestowed by the composer himself. (Conveniently, there are only 7 numbers, excluding earth and the Pluto, which had yet to become a planet doomed for demotion).

Constant reminders of the extreme temperatures by that too-effusive narrator (“That’s right, it looks pretty, but temperatures are actually NEGATIVE FIVE HUNDRED FARENHEIGHT this far out from the sun.”) were perhaps intended to stoke the kind of awe harbored by 8 year olds on a planetarium field trip. Furthermore, the camera work would speed up and slow down with the tempos of the music, another thing that should have set off my Code Orange cheesiness alert, but instead, turned me into a very enthusiastic 8-year-old. Clearly, I went to too many geeky Omnimax shows as a child. (Does anyone remember “Ring of Fire?”) This, I think, must be the cosmological equivalent of exoticism. If I had any musicologist friends I would ask them if there were any pentatonic scales- usually associated with the “exotic” far east in the music of Puccini - in Holst.

The menu also included a piece by Vaughn-Williams: “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis,” and Julia Wolfe’s new piece, written right after 9/11: “Silent Scream” (Wolfe is one of the co-founders of the new music institution, Bang on a Can). Given that we were up in the cheap seats of BAM’s Gilman Opera house, I was impressed by how clearly each section of the orchestra could be heard so high up.

As more and more orchestras use visual imagery to reach out to a younger, hipper demographic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s offering was – in comparison to the most blatantly commercial of those efforts – a highly enjoyable, if not the most organic, synthesis of technology and old-fashioned entertainment; Holst himself may have been thinking of ancient mysteries and mythological figures when he wrote the piece – more Joseph Campbell than Gene Roddenberry- but the end result is some great PR for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.