‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ famously used the opening of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra for its climactic moments. Strauss’ epic tone poem captures like no other musical work the awesomeness of nature, and mankind’s futile attempts to fully understand it.

Debussy’s erotically explicit Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune caused a scandal at its premiere. More profoundly, the short work quietly changed the course of Western classical music by opening doors to new ways of seeing, orchestrating and structuring.

Respighi paid homage to a permanent feature of the Roman landscape: its pine trees, silent witnesses to all acts great and small of that mighty civilization, from noisy children playing and the quiet of one of the city’s seven hilltops, to the depths of catacombs and the unstoppable march of the Roman Legion, armour gleaming in the sun on its triumphant return from battle.

Whether peering into deep space or the opposite way into the quantum realm, or looking at our reflections in mythology, or into our past, present and future, we strive to see from the only place we can; these are our ‘Visions from Earth’.