Brett Dean, Adams and Holst

Words fail to reflect the scale, beauty and mystery of space and the place of our planet. But music, as Marin Alsop suggests in the tantalising promise of this concert, does rather better. Brett Dean is one of a handful of composers to have written short orchestral ‘asteroids’ to add to Gustav Holst’s bold and bustling Planets. Komarov’s Fall continues Dean’s fascination with the death of a Soviet cosmonaut in panicked human circumstances. John Adams’ urgent, engaging music for his recent opera, about the testing of the atomic bomb, is heard here in symphonic form, in which a lone trumpet plaintively yet angrily intones the work’s poignant monologue Batter my heart.