Marketing in overdrive and a concept that has misfired, but don’t let that stop you listening to these fresh and considered performances. If there’s one medium on which it really doesn’t matter whether orchestral players are standing up, sitting down, playing from a score or playing with their eyes closed it’s an audio recording, not that it’s stopped DG making much of the fact that this Jupiter Symphony was played from memory. It’s only a distinguishing feature if you know about it, and on the principle that you can’t un-know something like that, I’d say it makes the most difference in the finale where, eyes on each other rather than on the dots, the players seem particularly adept at keeping out of each others’ way when the counterpoint gets knotty. This is a pointed, deep-driven performance that becomes joyous.

But Mozart’s is High Classical, rhetorical music. Any relationship to the concept ‘Music of the Spheres’ (sadly no Rued Langgaard …) is more theoretical than aesthetic; in the same vein, the Dowland song really only alludes to the Pythagorean idea verbally and feels like a big needle-jump after Max Richter’s Journey, which resembles Pärt’s Cantus played backwards (floating up rather than sliding down). It’s a piece that views its own concentric paths with focus and simplicity so it would have been good to hear it right next to Adès’s concerto, which goes big and bold on the idea and gets bound into a vortex of intensity much like Mozart’s symphony.

The Adès is wonderfully performed by Collon and his orchestra, who lock in to the music’s kinetic spinning rendered inevitable by science, while Pekka Kuusisto plays with grit and sureness of line, especially in the slow movement when the line so often drops out (to the naked ear, at least). I’m torn between thinking John Barber’s arrangement of Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars?’ is as beautifully light-touched as Muhly’s of Dowland’s ‘Time stands still’ on the one hand, and thinking it could have gone so much bolder and bigger on the other. As it is, the sudden jazz-hands of the final bars feel like scant compensation. It’s gorgeously sung by Sam Swallow but is a song that feels strangely out of place as a post-script here in a way Sam Amidon’s contributions to Aurora’s concept album ‘Road Trip’ (Warner, 2/15) never did. That recording is still a benchmark representation of Aurora’s linked-up musical thinking. ‘Music of the Spheres’ floats off in too many directions to be a solid album.