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Canberra Symphony Orchestra: Cottis conducts The Planets
5 November @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm AEDT

LOGOS is a ‘musical Big Bang’, beginning with the breath and building to a dramatic orchestral climax.
Expansive and layered, this beguiling work by Danish–Australian composer Benjamin de Murashkin reflects the order of mathematics and the mystery of the sublime, drawing inspiration from Tibetan music created to keep dark spiritual forces at bay.
An inventor, engineer and prolific composer, Josef Strauss, too, embraced rationality and creativity. His Music of the Spheres is a response to musica universalis: the philosophical idea that the stars and planets, suspended in perfect harmony, make their own music as they move across the heavens.
In The Planets, Gustav Holst personifies the celestial spheres, drawing on cosmic archetypes of astrology and Greek mythology. In the shadow of the Great War, he composed Mars and Venus, war and peace, before leading us from Mercury through Neptune, to the icy edges of the solar system – incorporating English folk melodies and dance rhythms along the way. The Planets ends, at the composer’s instruction, when ‘the sound is lost in the distance’.
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