Lorin Maazel Inappropriate Programming?

[Seán]

More musings from the Maestro:

Inappropriate Programming?

Had I known that a new planet only 13 million years old... and outside our solar system (an exoplanet)... would be discovered this week, I might have programmed Holst's "Planets".

What a planet...and still cooling off a monster with ten times Jupiter's mass and orbiting at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance! What sounds Gustav Holst would undoubtedly have heard in his inner ear to evoke "106906 b".

All music worthy of the name has that incredible power to depict objects, emotions, unchartered spaces, boundless dreams.

During last nights performance of Wagner's "Siegfried's Idyll" with the Munich Philharmonic, I felt drawn into those undefinable realms.

We then performed Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" which evoke so much more than seascapes, Britten's setting of "Les Illuminations" of Rimbaud, so much more than the unquiet stirrings of disconnected images, and finally Britten's Young Person's Guide, ostensibly about the instruments played in a symphony orchestra but actually sound-psychograms of the musicians who play them!

The vocal solist in "Les Illuminations" was Barbara Hannigan.
A consummate artist.

On second thought, another tone-poem about a new planet might have been redundant.

The music we played is as cosmic as it gets.

[fergus]

Had not seen of or heard of that "New Planet"....interesting!

[james]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/12 ... n-theories

"A giant exoplanet that is in the most distant orbit ever seen around its host star, has been recently discovered. Dubbed HD 106906 b, the newly discovered planet is relatively young (13 million years old, compare this to our 4.5 billion years old Earth) and bigger than any other planet discovered till date. It is 11 times the size of Jupiter, and that's what makes it a most singular discovery."

[fergus]

Thank you James.