Review: Houston Symphony ***

"I thought I had come to see the Houston Symphony, not to watch a film," complained one disgruntled young woman at the end of the concert by the top American orchestra.

She had a point; this innovative presentation of Holst's The Planets, the orchestra, in theatre lighting, were practically lost from view while the super-sized screen showed NASA's space expeditions.

Maybe the orchestra had difficulty seeing their music and the conductor, the fast movements, leaving something to be desired

in terms of ensemble, while the strings hardly packed the punch you

would have wanted and expected from their large numbers.

The integration between the visual aspects and Holst's music was very well handled, though the composer would surely have been surprised by the appearance of the planets he pictured.

When visible in the first half of the concert, they lived up to their high reputation with a wealth of subtle colours from the woodwind in Samuel Barber's single movement score, Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance.

Such attributes continued into the unhurried and soft-grained account of Stravinsky's La Chant du Rossignol, their conductor, Hans Graf, shaping the music in long lyric lines, ideally capturing the details of this story of the mechanical nightingale.