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Tomita
Holst: The Planets
(RCA, 1977)
Mark Beacham’s Dad really gave this a bending, on a hi-fi system that was the pride of Matchborough (why was the poshness of a ’70s sound system always inversely proportional to the size of the record collection?). And though, on the surface, there was no good reason for Sino-Japanese Mooghead Isao Tomita to remake Holst’s astrological suite with synths (apart from an unseemly Walter/Wendy Carlos obsession) there’s a quirky spirit at work – heard in the witty voice manipulations that preface the frankly f___ing noisy Mars – that keep you on board, and the newfangled conceptual framework (we’re in a rocket, whizzing through the solar system) offers something that would never have occurred to the composer, who died 23 years before Sputnik. It’s not all great – Venus is aimless, Mercury a bit weak – but that’s more than counterbalanced by the insanely overblown Jupiter, a mélange of space-wooshing, analogue nebula-bursts and camply binky-bonk melody that’s the dictionary definition of “too much”. I’m only sad that, at the time, I was too wedded to André Preview and the LPO to give it the shrift it deserved. Tomita proceeded to synth up Ravel’s Daphnis Et Chloe, and in 1984 he live-mixed his Mind Of The Universe opus in a glass pyramid suspended over an audience of 80,000 Austrians. In your face, Rick Wakeman. DE
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