Santa Fe Symphony to take a trip around 'The Planets'

The Santa Fe Symphony will bring audiences on a journey to “The Planets” on Sunday, Oct. 15, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

The concert opens with Himari Yoshimura, the youngest ever 15th International Competition for Young Violinists Grand Prize winner (Lublin 2021). At just 12 years of age, she joins her teacher and soloist Ida Kavafian for Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, plus her solo performance of Henryk Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp Minor.

Born in 2011, Yoshimura is a violin prodigy from Tokyo. She started playing the violin at age 3. In 2023, she won the “Public Award” at the triennial Montreal International Violin Competition.

“The Planets” is a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1917. In the last movement, the orchestra is joined by a wordless female chorus. Holst named each movement of the suite after a planet of the solar system and its supposed astrological character.

“The Planets” was composed over nearly three years, between 1914 and 1917. The work originated when Holst and his friend and benefactor Balfour Gardiner vacationed in Spain with the composer Arnold Bax and his brother, the author Clifford Bax. A discussion about astrology piqued Holst’s interest in the subject. Clifford Bax later said that Holst became “a remarkably skilled interpreter of horoscopes.” Shortly after the holiday, Holst wrote to a friend: “I only study things that suggest music to me. Then recently, the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely.”

The innovative nature of Holst’s music caused some initial hostility among a minority of critics, but the suite quickly became and has remained popular, influential and widely performed. The composer conducted two recordings of the work, and it has been recorded at least 80 times subsequently by conductors, choirs and orchestras internationally.