Stereophile

Years ago, Hyperion released a Planets that added Colin Matthews’s “Pluto, ” absent from Holst’s suite. Since then, alas, Pluto was demoted. Now the Melbourne Symphony has issued its own Planets—distributed through a partnership with LSO Live—appending an “Earth” movement composed by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon.

This is one of the finest Planets I’ve heard. It’s easy for conductors to underline this music’s splashy washes of sound and roof-raising climaxes, but Jaime Martín plays the score for color as well as power. “Venus” is serene, with a pure solo violin; “Saturn” goes with a mysterious, solemn tread. The two scherzos, “Mercury” and “Uranus,” are magical, with startling dynamic contrasts in the latter.

Once merely capable, the Melbourne Symphony has acquired a real personality. Strings, anchored by boldly resonant basses, provide warm top-to-bottom clarity; the airy, transparent reeds are a particular pleasure. The brass choir is powerful, with a clean, focused principal horn. The lead trumpet can be reticent: Note the back-and-forth with the trombone in “Mars.” Save for that movement’s dispirited snare drum, all the playing is poised and alert, coalescing into lustrous ensemble sonorities. All this is projected in open, spacious textures with clear definition, though the big organ glissando in “Uranus” briefly, inevitably, obscures matters. Details usually buried emerge, without artificial spotlighting. The fragmented textures of “Neptune” have a beautiful clarity, and the chorus sopranos “sneak in” like another instrument. This is as near “demonstration quality” as The Planets has gotten in years.

Jason Victor Serinus