Marin Alsop leads the Philadelphia Orchestra in ‘The Planets’ and a post-pandemic concerto

Concertos come in infinite shapes and forms these days — from musical soliloquies to star vehicles. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s guest conductor Marin Alsop reserved the flashier musical functions for the granddaddy of great film scores — Holst’s The Planets — and made space for Missy Mazzoli’s new-ish Violin Concerto (“Procession”) that addressed our darker post-pandemic world Friday at the Kimmel Center.

What other composers call movements, the 42-year-old Lansdale-born Mazzoli (best known for her opera Breaking the Waves) composed what she calls “five interconnected healing spells” that refer to the Black Plague of ages past, reaching back as far as the ninth century.

The movement subtitles: Healing Rituals, Procession in Spiral, Oh My Soul, Bone to Bone Blood, Procession Ascending. The piece addressed emotional states including the apprehensive melancholy that comes with having one’s body invaded by illness and the social isolation that comes with it. But never was the actual music archaic or even strange.

Often, the violin soloist — the charismatic Jennifer Koh — confessed these inner states against a backdrop of alternate musical activity, suggesting the outside world going about its business. The best moment, near the end, had the anguished violin writing juxtaposed against a Shéhérazade-like bassoon solo acting like a mysterious benevolent force.

Elsewhere in the piece, hazy chord structures conveyed brain fog; out-of-left-field outbursts felt like feverish dementia. So yes, there was much to connect with here, thanks also to Koh’s virtuoso magnetism. Even had I not known all of this extra-musical information, the piece would probably come off as a fine new violin concerto on its own musical merits.

In fact, of the three new violin concertos I’ve heard this month — Steve Mackey’s Beautiful Passing (a violinist monologue with an argumentative orchestra) and Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto (with penetrating introspection expressed in traditional forms) — Mazzoli’s had the most immediate impact, reflecting her increasingly rich orchestral palette that’s also heard in her new opera, The Listeners, which just premiered in Oslo.

The Friday concert was dedicated to recently deceased Bramwell Tovey, a frequent and beloved guest conductor, who received a beautiful, apt spoken tribute from the Orchestra’s Imasogie storyteller, narrator, and a host, Charlotte Blake Alston. But nothing could dampen the sonic showcase that was The Planets, in which the orchestra was joined by the off-stage women of the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir. Alsop didn’t probe or contemplate this suite of orchestra tone poems portraying the individual planets. She just performed it to the max — Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ and all.

At every turn, Alsop demonstrated great care and precision for projecting whatever sonority was at hand, starting with the warlike dissonance of the “Mars” movement. The piece itself is one dimensional, though in a performance that doesn’t let you step back from the music, you aren’t likely to notice.

Missing in this performance was any representation of Pluto, which wasn’t yet discovered when Holst wrote his orchestral suite. A “Pluto” movement was composed later by Colin Mathews, which enjoyed a brief vogue but was dropped when the planet’s status was downgraded.

The program is repeated Saturday at 8 p.m. in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Sts. Tickets are $49 to $179. www.philorch.org, 215-893-1999.