The sleeve promises a ‘memorable audiovisual experience’ featuring ‘spectacular images which enhance the symbolic meaning attributed to each planet by the composer’. Well, it’s certainly a feast for the eyes, and undeniably arresting images are legion (as well as a fair few cliché-ridden ones, too), but does it all shed any fresh perspective on Holst’s actual music, here finished off with Colin Matthews’s eighth planet? The director intermittently cuts to an oddly dispersed, moodily lit BBC NOW sitting inside what appears to be some vast empty warehouse. Unfortunately, the orchestra’s expert contribution under the baton of David Atherton is often submerged beneath jarring sound-effects (rumbling tanks, rustling leaves and the like) which threaten to relegate Holst’s visionary score to the role of aural wallpaper. I found the whole experience unnervingly akin to sitting through some ghastly corporate presentation; my senses duly dulled, I sought an immediate antidote in the form of Boult’s spellbindingly intense and atmospheric 1945 recording with the BBC SO (Beulah, 12/96) – an infinitely more nourishing and revelatory exercise. Try before you buy.