Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner – review

None of the three musicians at the Barbican tonight are strangers to the grand cosmic scheme. The National's guitarist Bryce Dessner was in this very hall in February performing his audiovisual Mayan dream-hymn The Long Count. Nico Muhly has composed more than 100 contemporary classical works since 2001, including an opera about an internet death pact. And psych-folk wunderkind Sufjan Stevens aborted plans to record an album about every American state when he realised he'd be around 286 when he finished it. So who better to collaborate on Planetarium, a "work in progress" suite of songs celebrating our solar system – except, perhaps, Sun Ra, Muse and Dr Brian Cox?

After a first half during which the Navarra String Quartet showcase each of the collaborators' classical endeavours, a huge black orb overhead lights up with the colours of each celestial body in turn, while Stevens guides us through the cosmos song by song, dropping in astronomical detail and making sly references to Uranus's ring.

A song cycle merging the National's honeyed scree, Muhly's disjointed pomp and Stevens's electronics and modernist folk tendencies alike, Planetarium adroitly captures the essence of each dancing sphere. Neptune is icy and graceful, Venus a vocoder-voiced sci-fi romance. Saturn is a colourful blaze of grimetronica that evokes Tinie Tempah doing the robot around the rings, and Jupiter ("the loneliest planet") an imposing electro throb that expands into a violent storm of techno clatter and symphonic bombast, like a Björk opera.

The sun gets short shrift, with a few waves of warm brass from the New Trombone Collective. There's more sympathy for the celestial underdogs: Pluto gets a sublime blues ballad of disownment and Mercury the best tune of the set, an aching lament played on muted molten horns. And good old Earth? A maelstrom of inhuman religious slogans, warlike trombones and MIA-style afrobeat mania, then it blows itself up. Heavenly.