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Music Monday | The Blockbuster That Began on Two Pianos | August 31, 2026
“The Planets” is one of the most famous orchestral works ever written, its swaggering Mars and soaring Jupiter echoing through concert halls and film scores for a century. But here is what most people never learn: Gustav Holst wrote it for two pianos first.
Holst suffered from severe neuritis, a painful nerve condition in his right arm that made holding a pen an agony. So, he composed “The Planets” at the keyboard instead, and two devoted colleagues from the girls’ school where he taught, Vally Lasker and Nora Day, played the two-piano version back to him movement by movement as he worked, then helped him build the full orchestral score from his sketches. Before any orchestra ever touched it, the score lived on two pianos.
Today’s movement is “Uranus, the Magician,” a boisterous, spell-casting romp full of mischief and swagger that foreshadows our theme for Piano Slam 2027, “Beyond Boundaries.”
Hear it the way Holst first did, performed by the Gerwig & Gonzalez duo.
