📍 Where: Aspen Music Festival – YouTube
🎶 Program: Gustav Holst — The Planets, Op. 32
👤 Performers: Aspen Festival Orchestra — Robert Spano, conductor
🕔 Date & Time: Live on 24 August 2025, 5:15 PM MDT (GMT-6)
▶️ Availability: Free streaming on YouTube
The Aspen Music Festival closes its season with Gustav Holst’s most celebrated score, The Planets. Written between 1914 and 1916, the seven-movement suite draws inspiration not from Roman mythology but from the astrological character of each planet. Holst himself suggested that the subtitles were enough to guide the listener: Mars, the Bringer of War; Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity; Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age, and so on.
The orchestral invention and colour of The Planets quickly made Holst famous — a recognition he never fully embraced — and the work remains a landmark of 20th-century symphonic writing. Under the direction of Robert Spano, the Aspen Festival Orchestra brings the season to a close with this cosmic journey that culminates in the ethereal fade of Neptune, the Mystic.
Subscribe to our newsletter