Pluto, the Renewer, Colin Matthews’ appendix to The Planets, receives three performances in November from Alpesh Chauhan and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Chauhan will also conduct the movement with the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on 20 November, in a performance of The Planets prefaced by Thomas Adès’ Polaris, a ‘voyage for orchestra’ that conjures up its own portrait of the cosmos.
The 6-minute piece begins before ‘Neptune’, with its offstage choir, has concluded, with high, muted violins launching a series of scurrying figures. Rather than continuing the hieratic, timeless character of the proceeding movement, Matthews writes fast music, inspired initially by the idea of solar winds. The asymmetric meter and warlike fanfares, which burst through as the piece gathers momentum, also recall the opening movement of The Planets. As its climax recedes, the sounds of the female voices from ‘Neptune’ drift back in, as if they had been present all along, and Matthews’ scherzo disappears as mysteriously as it began.
Since its debut in 2000 with Kent Nagano and the Hallé Orchestra, Pluto has been widely taken up, receiving over 140 performances to date. Its exponents include Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Osmo Vänskä with the Minnesota Orchestra and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony with the late Leif Segerstam.
Matthews dedicated the movement to the memory of Imogen Holst, a longtime collaborator and whose music Matthews has celebrated in Discovering Imogen - an NMC orchestral portrait disc released in autumn 2024.