Planetarium

An exceptional collaboration from perhaps the three most defining creative minds from today’s New York's inspirational music scene.

With his The Age of Adz album tour this year, Sufjan Stevens once again confirmed his status as an inimitable singer-songwriter genius; Bryce Dessner delivered sell-out performances with The National and Nico Muhly brought us the soundtrack for the Oscar-winning film The Reader as well as the recent Two Boys opera at ENO.

Presenting a unique song cycle entitled Planetarium for seven trombones and string quartet with vocals from Sufjan Stevens, the concert opens with a series of beguiling string quartets – most of them UK premieres.

All three musicians come together in collaboration for Planetarium. Each of the 11 songs relates to one of the heavenly bodies of the solar system (Sun, Moon, and nine planets). Two (the Sun and the Moon) are instrumental; the rest cover wide-ranging themes sometimes only tangentially or surrealistically related to the planet in question.
Not so much a catalogue of musical images, like Holst's Planets, the planet metaphor is used more as a way of organising the world into song-sized bites. So 'Jupiter' meditates on awkwardness and loneliness, 'Venus' on young love.
Once more the smallest details matter: tremolos on Dessner's guitar evoke the spinning rings of Saturn; Muhly's celeste, glittering starlight.
The music personifies these giant, celestial objects, until they shrink before us to something we can almost sing to.