women’s chorus, Nocturnes serves as a prelude to another
Debussy masterpiece, Le Mer (The Sea).
In the program notes for the first performance, Debussy offered
his own thoughts on each movement: “Nuages (Clouds) portrays the
unchanging aspect of the sky, with the slow, melancholy motion of
the clouds, dying away in shades of grey softly tinged with white.
Fetes (Festivals) represents the movement and dancing rhythm
of the atmosphere, with sudden flashes of light; then an episode
of a procession passing through and merging with the festivities.
Sirenes (Sirens) evokes the sea and its innumerable rhythms; then,
among the silver of the moonlit waves, the mysterious song of the
Sirens before they laugh and pass on.’’
Nocturnes helped launch the radical in Debussy, although his
was a quiet rebellion, wrote Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s classical
music critic, in a 2018 retrospective for the 100th year of Debussy’s
death. “Debussy accomplished something that happens very
rarely, and not in every lifetime: He brought a new kind of
beauty into the world. Debussy engineered a velvet revolution,
overturning the extant order without upheaval.’’
T H E P L A N E T S
Gustav Holst (1874-1934) • Duration: ca. 51 minutes
The Florida Orchestra offered a multidimensional performance
of The Planets 20 years ago, complete with NASA imagery
projected above the stage and a narrator describing stops along
the way. Audiences were enthralled as much by Holst’s popular
score as they were of video pieced together from the Viking,
Voyager and Magellan space missions.
It was a gamble to be so overtly descriptive with a suite inspired
more by mysticism and astrology than astronomy, but audiences
enjoyed the ride. Other orchestras around the country have had
similar success with the mosaic, and this week TFO continues
the trend. The Planets, however, is less a depiction of the solar
system than a suite of miniature, often turbulent tone poems of
varying moods and colors. Holst, who died in 1934, wanted to
create an emotional experience rather than a postcard tour, and
he delivered his one-hit wonder with a dramatic punch.
“There’s just a powerful juxtaposition of the different sections,
especially between Venus and Mars,’’ said TFO Music Director
Michael Francis. “And it was an absolutely radical piece of