Mason Bates brings back Devil’s Radio, an orchestral piece commissioned by the Sun Valley Music Festival for its 30th Anniversary in 2014. This year also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing with Passage, a piece Bates wrote for mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke that incorporates excerpts from John F. Kennedy’s “moonshot” speech. Finally, fly beyond the moon to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter in Holst’s character study of the solar system, The Planets.

Musicians of the Sun Valley Music Festival curate and perform a program of pieces they love.

Life, death, and rebirth. Mahler’s modest ambition to express the totality of the human condition journeys through love, hope, nostalgia, humor, despair, a face-melting shriek of death, and finally a glorious resurrection. Does it succeed? Alasdair Neale recalls his first hearing at age 13: “It rocked my world – I had never imagined music could have that level of visceral, emotional impact.”