The Planets
Friday, May 8, 2026 • 8:00 p.m.
Benaroya Hall (200 University St)
Harmonia Orchestra & Chorus
William White, conductor
Wellspring Ensemble
Rose Beattie, mezzo-soprano
Program
Robert Kechley (*1952)
Fanfare
Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)
Psaume XXIV (“La terre appartient à l’Eternel”)
Lili Boulanger
Du fond de l’abîme
— intermission —
Gustav Holst (1874–1934)
The Planets, Op. 32
About the Concert
Gustav Holst wrote The Planets between 1914 and 1918, reflecting the anger, desolation, joy and mystery of the Roman deistic pantheon. At precisely the same time, the young French composer Lili Boulanger explored the same gamut of emotions in her settings of the Psalms. Hearing these masterpieces back to back is a tantalizing musical experience not to be missed.
This performance will last approximately one hour and 50 minutes, including one intermission.
Maestro’s Prelude
— Will White
Guest Artists
Mezzo-soprano Rose Beattie grew up near Seattle and moved to Los Angeles to attend the USC Thornton School of Music, where she received her B.M. in Vocal Performance. She has since completed her M.M. and D.M.A. at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Her teaching experience includes having been awarded fellowships to teach six UCLA courses, including an interdisciplinary course she created, “The Construction of Women in Western Opera.” She currently teaches voice at the Colburn School of Music. Dr. Beattie has sung Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a guest artist for the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program and Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana with Lyric Opera Northwest. Other opera credits include: Madame Flora in The Medium, Principessa in Suor Angelica, Dorabella in Cosí fan tutte, Mercedes in Carmen, and Fate in the premiere of Ian Krouse’s Lorca, Child of the Moon. Most recently, she holds a Los Angeles Opera roster position with performances including Aknahten, Carmen, Tosca and La bohème. On Los Angeles concert stages, she has performed Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, Jake Heggie's Statuesque and Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été. Solo performance with the Los Angeles Master Chorale include Ricky Ian Gordon’s Grapes of Wrath and Handel’s Messiah. Her premieres include Yotam Haber's Death Will Come and She Will Have Your Eyes as well as Christopher Tin’s cross-over piece Beber. As a member of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Dr. Beattie frequently performs at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, at the Hollywood Bowl, and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, working with conductors Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Grant Gershon.
learn more: www.rosebeattie.com
A dynamic and high-energy choral group founded in 2013 by artistic director and conductor Evan Norberg, Wellspring Ensemble aspires to create meaningful and emotional connections by performing diverse works and engaging in educational and community outreach. Wellspring Ensemble has stationed itself firmly in the Seattle choral scene, its members including carpenters, lawyers, web and graphic designers, and a myriad of other professions.
learn more: www.wellspringensemble.org
Program Notes
Robert Kechley
Fanfare
Robert Kechley was born in Seattle on June 1, 1952. This fanfare is extracted from this Symphony No. 1, premiered on June 2, 1984, and revised in 1992. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds (plus piccolo, English horn and contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.
The music of Robert Kechley is familiar to longtime Harmonia audiences through the numerous works by him that have been premiered by the organization over the past five decades. These vary from arrangements of folk songs and hymns, to major symphonic and choral works, including his delightful Symphony No. 2 (“Ferdinand the Bull”), a setting of Psalm 100 for organ, chorus and orchestra (first performed in September 2000 at Benaroya Hall), concertos for flute (2002) and trumpet (2004), Running Passages for 23 solo instruments (2006), and an 11-movement Folk Song Suite for chorus and orchestra (2009) —all under the direction of Harmonia founder George Shangrow. In 2011, his concerto for bassoon, chorus and orchestra received its premiere with soloist Judith Lawrence and conductor Alastair Willis, and in February 2023, William White led the world premiere of a Harmonia commission, Hard Times: Antiphonal Conversations for two harpsichords and chamber orchestra. Other ensembles that have commissioned and performed his music include the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, Seattle Bach Choir and Northwest Boychoir.
Robert Kechley grew up in Seattle and attended the University of Washington, where he studied harpsichord performance with Sylvia Kind and composition with Kenneth Benshoof, Robert Suderberg, William O. Smith and others. A member of the Seattle Chamber Singers from its earliest days, he not only sang in the chorus but played oboe and recorder, and played harpsichord for the group’s annual Messiah performances (as well as countless other works).
The fanfare heard this evening comes from the opening of the finale of this Symphony No. 1, originally composed and premiered in 1984, then revised in 1992. It opens, in the words of the composer, “with a four-bar tune and a three-bar bridge. A set of variations follows, featuring different sections of the orchestra and finally putting them all together.”
Lili Boulanger
Psaume XXIV
Marie-Juliette Olga (“Lili”) Boulanger was born August 21, 1893, in Paris, and died at Mézy-sur-Seine on March 15, 1918. She composed this setting of Psalm 24 in Rome during 1916, scoring the choral accompaniment for 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, timpani, harp and organ.
As a result of her winning the Prix de Rome in 1913, Lili Boulanger was awarded an extended stay at the Villa Medici in Rome (along with a monthly stipend), but illness cut short her initial trip to Italy. Health issues and her efforts in support of students from the Paris Conservatoire fighting in World War I curtailed her composing efforts for a time, but during the first half of 1916 she was able to return to Rome, where she composed settings of Psalm 24 (heard this evening) and Psalm 129. She completed a treatment of Psalm 130 (Du fond de l’abîme) the following year.
Boulanger began sketching Du fond de l’abîme as early as 1913, and she may have been contemplating her other psalm settings simultaneously (including several that were never realized). She apparently never heard Psalm 24 performed during her lifetime. Published in 1924, details of its first performance remain elusive.
Dedicated to Jules Griset, an industrialist director of Choral Guillot de Saint-Brice, Psalm 24 opens with fanfares that call to mind the brilliant brass writing of Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta (composed a decade later). The scoring for brass, organ and harp suggests, as Boulanger biographer Léonie Rosenstiel notes, “a consciously archaic and regal style,” as does the Gregorian chant–style choral writing for lower voices at the beginning of the work. The mood relaxes somewhat at the second verse, with a solo tenor singing the third.
“This is an assertive work,” Rosenstiel continues. “Both the instruments and the voices are quite aggressive in declaring God’s dominion over the earth. The women’s voices appear to add both greater substance and a degree of word-painting to the composition, entering as they do for the first time on the words ‘Gates, lift up your heads, eternal gates.’” The closing pages return to the work’s opening material.
“Whereas the compositions written around the time of her Prix de Rome were impressionistic, characterized by polyharmonics, mixed sonorities, modal and whole-tone scales, and nature poetry” writes Michael Alber, “Boulanger developed a completely different and bold expressivity in Psalm 24.”
Lili Boulanger
Psaume CXXX
Boulanger completed this work in 1917. Henri Büsser conducted the first performance in Paris on January 17, 1923. In addition to solo alto and chorus, the score calls for triple woodwinds (including piccolo, English horn, bass clarinet and contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, organ, celesta and strings.
Lili Boulanger’s setting of Psalm 130 is her most ambitious choral-orchestral work, and the longest of her post–Prix de Rome compositions aside from the song cycle Clairières dans le ciel for tenor and piano. Her sketches reveal that the work was originally intended to be substantially shorter, but along the way she added orchestral episodes while repeating sections of text. Exactly when Boulanger began thinking about setting Psalm 130 remains unclear, but it likely predates her sketches for Psalms 24 and 129.
Boulanger dedicated Du fond de l’abîme (“Out of the depths”) to her father (“à la mémoire de mon cher Papa”), who had died when she was six. Psalm 130 is a prayer for the dead, leading Caroline Potter to theorize that the composer may have planned for it to be part of a Requiem mass, although others dispute this theory.
Reviewing a February 1923 performance of Du fond de l’abîme, composer Florent Schmitt (who had created a remarkable setting of Psalm 47 in 1904), wrote: “Coming from the mysteries of the abyss, a song rises slowly, the choirs staged parallel to the orchestra, whose music successively emerges little by little to reach the most desperate violence.”
The work opens quite literally in the depths of the orchestra, with tuba and cellos yielding to a rising contrabassoon motive that eventually passes upward through the orchestra. (Léonie Rosenstiel likens this passage to the opening bars of Ravel’s La valse and Concerto for the Left Hand, both composed years later). An impassioned dialogue between first and second violins leads to a dramatic dotted trumpet figure. All of this material will recur throughout the work.
After reaching a climax, the orchestra descends back into the depths, setting the stage for the initial choral entry, evoking plainsong chant and built on a half-step interval (“denoting fear”). “After the voices join into a contrapuntal texture,” writes Rosenstiel, “they regroup and end the section in aggressive homophony.” A brief orchestral interlude leads to a faster section in which altos and basses reprise the dotted trumpet motive.
An increasingly urgent instrumental passage featuring material from the opening leads to an impassioned choral-orchestral outburst that subsides as the soloist introduces a new melody (“Si tu prends garde aux péchés”). The pace quickens and builds once again as the chorus returns. Instrumental solos over harp arpeggios set the stage for another solo passage (“Mais la clémence est en toi”). The chorus returns briefly as the mood lightens somewhat and a solo tenor from the chorus joins the alto soloist (“Car en Iahvé est la miséricorde”).
Just at the point when listeners might suspect that Boulanger is heading toward an uplifting, hopeful conclusion, the mood plunges once again into despair with a return of the “out of the depths” motive, concluding (as the work began) in B♭ minor.
Gustav Holst
The Planets, Op. 32
Holst was born September 21, 1874, in Cheltenham, England, and died May 25, 1934, in London. He began composing this seven-movement orchestral suite in 1914, completing it in 1917. The work requires 4 flutes (2 doubling piccolo, one doubling bass flute), 3 oboes (one doubling bass oboe), English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tenor tuba, tuba, 2 sets of timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, gong, orchestra bells, snare drum, tambourine, triangle, xylophone), organ, celesta, 2 harps, strings and — in the final movement — an offstage chorus of sopranos and altos.
“As a rule, I only study things which suggest music to me,” wrote Gustav Holst in 1913. “That’s why I worried at Sanskrit. Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology.” Holst’s interest in Hindu philosophy dated from 1895, and he taught himself Sanskrit in order to compose works such as the opera Sita (unperformed during his lifetime), the Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda and The Cloud Messenger. A 1908 trip to Algeria inspired the orchestral suite Beni Mora, about which his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote: “If it had been played in Paris rather than London it would have given its composer a European reputation, and played in Italy would probably have caused a riot.” During a March 1913 excursion with composer Arnold Bax, his brother Clifford and Balfour Gardiner (a champion of Holst’s music), Clifford Bax shared with Holst his interest in astrology.
The previous September, Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra had premiered at one of Henry Wood’s Promenade concerts, and in January 1914 Schoenberg traveled to London to conduct a second performance — attended by Holst, who obtained a copy of the score. Later that year, Holst set about writing a work (with nearly identical instrumentation) he would call Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra, attaching to each movement a title related to the astrological character of one of the eight planets (omitting Earth).
Preoccupied with his “day job” teaching music at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, Holst composed his uncommissioned orchestral suite largely during weekends and holidays over a three-year period, occasionally interrupted by work on other projects. After completing A Dirge for Two Veterans in the spring of 1914, Holst began sketching “Mars, the Bringer of War,” completing it shortly before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in August of that year. He composed the remaining movements in order, save “Mercury, the Winged Messenger,” which he wrote last, finishing it during early 1916. The orchestration took another year.
Due to frail health, Holst could not serve in the military, but (after modifying his Germanic surname “von Holst”), he took a YMCA post organizing music at internment camps. Shortly before Holst departed England, Gardiner lavished upon his friend the gift of a private performance of The Planets at Queen’s Hall on September 29, 1918, led by Adrian Boult (after a mere one-hour rehearsal). Excerpts from the suite appeared on public concert programs over the next two years, to mixed reviews. When Holst’s 1917 The Hymn of Jesus debuted to widespread acclaim in March 1920, interest in a complete performance of The Planets surged, resulting in a November 15, 1920, London Symphony Orchestra concert directed by Albert Coates — after which most critics revised their assessment of the work. The Planets would become Holst’s signature composition, overshadowing all of the music he produced during his remaining 14 years.
Rather than tone poems in the Richard Strauss mold that depict specific action, each movement of The Planets is a character study of the astrological entity in question, based in part on descriptions from Alan Leo’s book What Is a Horoscope and How Is It Cast? And while Schoenberg’s Five Pieces likely provided an overall template, early reviewers and later writers detected influences from many other composers.
Boult later reported that Holst sought to convey “the stupidity of war” with the insistent 5/4 ostinato rhythms of “Mars”; according to Kenric Taylor, its “blatant dissonance and unconventional meter seems to be riddled with the influence of Stravinsky” (whose The Rite of Spring debuted in London in 1913). In “Venus,” David Trippett detects hints of Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, Stravinsky’s Firebird and “a celesta passage from the second of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces,” while Holst derived the opening from one of his own (abandoned) vocal works, A Vigil of Pentecost.
In “Mercury,” Holst uses bitonality, shifting accents and three-against-four rhythmic patterns to suggest the winged messenger scurrying about, techniques he had employed in his 1915 Japanese Suite. To one reviewer, the opening of “Jupiter” brought to mind Rimsky-Korsakov (who in turn influenced Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrushka), but the inspiration for the majestic central episode is clearly “Nimrod” from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
For “Saturn,” Holst drew on material from Dirge and Hymeneal, his 1915 composition for female chorus and piano. “Uranus,” which opens with a broadly stated four-note motive that pervades the movement, recalls Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The use of a wordless chorus of sopranos and altos in “Neptune” may derive from Claude Debussy’s “Sirènes” (from Nocturnes), but the use of shifting orchestral colors in place of a clearly definable melody echoes the third of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces (“Farben,” or “Colors”).
— Jeff Eldridge