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Turnage and Dean asteroids in orbit with The Planets

(July 2006)

In March Simon Rattle launched a performance of Holst’s Planets Suite with a difference. The Berliner Philharmoniker’s ‘Ad Astra’ programme included four new orchestral ‘asteroids’ commissioned from Brett Dean, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Matthias Pintscher and Kaija Saariaho, and the evening concluded with Colin Matthews’ music for the ‘missing’ planet Pluto.

The complete event was recorded by EMI, and the disc is released this month. The Berlin Philharmoniker under Rattle takes the programme to the Salzburg Festival on 28 August, and plans are underway for further performances next season by different orchestras.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s orchestral miniature is named Ceres after the largest and first asteroid, discovered in 1801. The composer describes how after reading a Bill Bryson book he became intrigued by “the doomsday aspect of asteroids and the idea that the earth could be destroyed by one any day”. His score is influenced by the idea of rocky objects orbiting in loose formation: “Blocks of musical material gradually mesh together and then explode”. Turnage is composing two more 'asteriod' works to be premiered by the Bamberg Symphony and Jonathan Nott next February: Juno and The Torino Scale.

Brett Dean’s Komarov’s Fall refers to the Soviet cosmonaut who was the first person to die in space and whose name was given to the asteroid ‘1836 Komarov’ discovered in 1971. The music features the “eerie, lonely beauty to be found in recordings of space telemetry signals”, jagged rhythms based upon “a vivid archival recording of Komarov’s frantic discussions with the control centre” and the imagined farewell between Komarov and his wife as it became clear that the Soyuz spacecraft was doomed.

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