"Sungrazer" (for orchestra) by Jacob Fanto

"Sungrazer" (for orchestra) by Jacob Fanto
Premiered and recorded by the Berkshire Symphony (2025)

Sungrazers are a class of comets that venture perilously close to the Sun at their nearest orbital point, known as perihelion. In many ways, their arcs mirror the story of Icarus, the figure from Greek mythology who flew too close to the Sun and met a tragic end. As the comets plunge into the Sun’s fiery atmosphere, intense heat and solar wind vaporize their frozen surfaces, forming brilliant tails of dust and ionized gas which make them some of the brightest and most dramatic comets observed. While some larger sungrazers survive their passage, most are overwhelmed by the Sun’s extreme heat, gravitational stress, and radiation, ultimately disintegrating or exploding. When Earth passes through a trail of cometary debris, we are presented with a beautiful meteor shower, often referred to as “falling” or “shooting stars.”

The opening of Sungrazer represents the emptiness and vastness of space, with violins sustaining harmonics over an array of distant, blinking stars. The emergence of the sungrazer comet is heralded by low strings and brass and the orchestra propels into a whirling, shimmering texture of angular canons in the violins and woodwinds. The French horn introduces a melody which rises step by step only to fall below its starting point, a recurring theme which suggests the ambitious, but often doomed, journey of sungrazers. As the comet approaches the Sun, its growing brilliance is reflected in radiant, sweeping passages, which is contrasted with the unyielding percussiveness of its violent struggle against immense tidal forces. Faced with inevitable destruction, the sungrazer hurdles through the Sun’s inferno towards its fate – the music surges to a blazing climax, erupting in a final cataclysm of light and fire as the comet is torn apart. The orchestra itself disintegrates into a recapitulation of the ethereal opening material, once again suspended in empty space. Faint glimmers of shooting stars trail in the sungrazer’s wake, depicted by flickering woodwind bursts, and as a meteor shower fills the sky, the rest of the orchestra builds into a luminous soundscape while the comet’s “fate” theme drifts one final time between the French horn, cello, and flutes.