Holst’s The Planets performed by Cheltenham Symphony Orchestra

Gloucester Cathedral is delighted to be hosting a very special centenary performance of Holst’s much-loved Planets Suite, in the composer’s own county Cathedral.

The Cheltenham Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Gloucester Cathedral’s Director of Music Adrian Partington in what will be a roof-raising concert of light and sound. The Cathedral’s own Girl Choristers will perform the famous ethereal ladies’ chorus that ends the suite.

The concert will begin with a performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture.

Written at the end of WW1, during which Holst spent time working with troops at Salonica, the Planets Suite is an apt start to the Cathedral’s autumn programme of events commemorating the end of the war.

Laura Kinnear, Curator of the Holst Birthplace Museum, will deliver a pre-concert talk in the Lady Chapel at 6.00pm, covering her research into Holst’s war work and the ongoing Salonica exhibition at the Museum.

The Sauret Strad returns to Gloucester …

The programme will also include fellow Gloucestershire composer Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending, frequently named as one the Britain’s favourite classical works, and composed as a response to WW1. We are thrilled that rising star Nazrin Rashidova will perform the violin solo in this work, and even more so that she will be playing it on the 1685 Sauret Stradivari.