CD Reviews

GLASS BOX: Music by Philip Glass. 10 CD Nonesuch. (Sony Classical; Orange Mountain Music; Virgin, Shandar)

Philip Glass piano, keyboards,: The Philip Glass Ensemble, Michael Riesman, keyboards, music director; Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra; Vienna Radio Symphony; Bruckner Orchester Linz; American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor, various vocal soloists; New York City Opera Orchestra, Christopher Keene. conductor, various vocal soloists; English Chamber Orchestra, Michael Riesman, Harry Rabinowitz, conductors; various film studio orchestras with members of The PGE and The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble;conducted by Michael Riesman; Kronos Quartet – David Harrington; John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, cello; Lyric Quartet.

Philip Glass is so ubiquitous and successful that’s it’s easy to take him for granted and stop listening. Sure, he repeats, uses arpeggios, broken chords, minor modes/keys, and his style is instantly identifiable and frequently copied. But he’s always been interested in re-inventing himself and he’s changed the rules of his game by putting himself into unknown situations with other artists, or forms, and sometimes both at once. The fruits of several seminal collaborations with theatre director Robert Wilson — -EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (1975), and film director Godfrey Reggio — KOYAANISQATSI (1983) are in this with essays and appreciations 40 year retrospective set. But there’s a kicker. Glass frequently works with visual artists, or artists from theatre or film, but the CD only format can’t show how his music works with images. Yet it does show how arresting his music is as sound, and those who think he hasn’t changed, developed, or matured are in for a shock or a revelation.

The early works (1969- 70) on the eponymously titled disc one were shocking to some and a revelation to others when first performed. Glass threw the academic rule book out the window, but kept what he learned from Nadia Boulanger – the music of the classic masters was both logical and inevitable — and that sense of inevitable logic certainly drives these works here. The carefully added lines in MUSIC IN SIMILAR MOTION (1969) are like a mural you have to walk with in order to see, and its development is just as planned as the nearly hour long 1970 MUSIC WITH CHANGING PARTS – 45 minutes here – in which Glass let his musicians play and sing pitches they heard in its intricate overlapping parts which I think reflects his rarely remarked on before India encounter with the rhythmic patterning of Moroccan ritual music where drones and simple shifting counts – there are frequent contrasts between 2 and 3 and multiples thereof – become the building blocks for something very complex.

These early works grew in complexity as Glass’ musical language developed , but their complexity has nothing to do with the serial method in vogue when they were written. That was tied to the dialectical view of history as a kind of conflict resolution process, which starts as thesis, moves on to antithesis, and culminates in synthesis. These pieces function outside of history, or rather within their own idea of history and time.

Glass decided to confront that subject head on in the massive yet ingeniously varied MUSIC IN 12 PARTS (1971-74) [ disc two ] which is, in some almost dialectical way the culmination of his minimalist period. Or as Glass told me ” My idea was to write a piece that was like a catalog, a kind of grand compendium of all the ideas I had worked out”¦ and I tried to find ways of linking an overall harmonic structure to an overall rhythmic structure to produce a kind of (laughs) unified field theory of music. ” Time and how it’s perceived is a large part of what it’s about, and Glass has many ways of expanding our sense of it here. Producers Robert Hurwitz, Kurt Munkacsi, and Michael Riesman have chosen parts VII to X so that the listener can experience them as a sequence of developing units and not just bleeding chunks. There’s a lot of variety in Glass’ sometimes circumscribed approach – a full range of contrapuntal devices and rhythms as well as surprising but perfectly logical changes of direction and texture. But you can’t hear the unwritten undertones and overtones which emerge from the overlapping lines, volume, and acoustic properties of the room where it’s played live. And a rare complete performance by the PGE at San Francisco’s Davies Hall 16 Feb 2009 will certainly bring these out. Orange Mountain Music – — has also released a PGE live at Rovereto, Italy, 2006 set of 12 PARTS, which is as thrilling and cogent as this studio one though the tempos are markedly slower in several places.

Glass’ 5 hour ” opera ” with Robert Wilson EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (1975) – [ disc three ] – is paradoxically more elaborate and simpler than 12 PARTS, as befits a work tailored for and responsive to the exigencies of stage action. These excerpts give a good sense of its shape as well as its intimate – all 5 Knee Plays – and spectacular dimensions – Train 1 and the concluding Spaceship scene. The incisiveness and elegance of the playing and singing defines the character of the piece as I imagine it to be when encountered live – all space, light, movement, décor – aligned with Glass’ strongly varied harmonic and rhythmic densities, though I miss the seat of your pants rawness of the PGE’s Tomato LP . Still it’s wonderful to hear the Prologue from Act V ( Rome Section ) of Wilson’s originally for the 1984 LA Olympics the CIVIL wars (1983) — a beautiful, imaginative, and tremendously moving score with killer bass clarinet solos, which Dennis Russell Davies and his American Composers Orchestra play with heart and soul. But there’s not a note from the Wilson/ Glass – Rumi poems MONSTERS OF GRACE (1997) , which is on OMM.

Three of Glass’ 5 collaborations with Reggio – KOYAANISQATSI (1983) , POWAQQATSI (1987) – [ disc 6 ], and ANIMA MUNDI (1999) [disc 10] are here. KOYAANISQATSI is revered for its fits like a glove marriage of image and sound – the slow moving lines and suspended harmonies in “Organic” and the unsettling altered chords in “Resource” are perfect musical analogues as well as stand alone pieces as are al the others — while Glass’ absorption of world music instruments into his own idiom in POWAQQATSI is striking, but much less known, largely because its distributor, Cannon Films, was going bankrupt when it was released. But the last installment in Reggio’s QATSI trilogy, NAQOYQATSI (2002), with its intricate textures and demanding but perfectly apt writing for cellist Yo Yo Ma – it’s on SONY Classical – sadly didn’t make the cut. But the good news is that all 3 QATSI films have gotten a new lease on life by being performed live with the PGE.

Glass’ orchestra only and orchestra with voices writing , which appears throughout his 8 symphonies. has grown by leaps and bounds. The strings only – violin 1 and 2, violas, cellos, double basses – Symphony # 3 (1995) [ disc nine ] is full of timbral contrasts despite its white on white sound which Stravinsky and Herrmann also exploited in APOLLO (1927) and PSYCHO (1960), and the third movement’s quick assymetrical metres — 7 /8 , 9/8 “¦ are virtuosic and thrilling. The complex rhythmic and harmonic writing for every choir approach of Symphony # 8 (2005), which Dennis Russell Davies and his Bruckner Orchester Linz premiered at BAM on their first US tour in 2005, and play here, is extremely original and subtle. The 8 themes which begin the first movement are closely related yet legible, the second movement passacaglia ventures into strange harmonic waters ala Boulanger’s teacher, Faure, and the third and final one, with its sense of deep and inevitable sorrow, never fails to bring me to tears, whether at BAM, or at home.

Chamber music speaks from the mind and heart , and Glass’ string quartets are clearly letters from home. # 4 (Buczak) (1987) [ disc seven ] , which was commissioned by Geoffrey Hendricks as a memorial to his young artist lover Brian Buczak, who died of AIDS, has an alternately ecstatic, and otherworldly character – the suspended in time middle slow movement – while the first movement’s sostenuto   chords seem to frame a kind of narrative of Buczak, Hendricks and Glass together – they were friends – in a continuously evolving present, which extends to the third and final movement, too. Lots of the writing in # 5 (1991) , with its frequent metric shifts , mercurial changes of texture, and the headlong dive of its chromatic scales in 17/8, at a very fast tempo, is openly virtuosic, and Glass told me he asked David Harrington and Kronos to play it as one thought, which they do, with accuracy and point, in all 3 quartets here. Four of the 10 Etudes for Piano (1994), which Glass wrote for Davies to play, and which Glass does here, are very personal, idiosyncratic and non-didactic additions to this form which Chopin and Debussy enlarged so beautifully before him.

Glass’ use of the orchestra in his Gandhi opera SATYAGRAHA (1979 [ disc five ] is not unlike that of Debussy in PELLEAS Et MELISANDE (1893-1902) , where the orchestra disappears into the music, and being invisible in this way becomes more deeply felt. His wind and string – with one synthesizer – writing evokes a completely unique sound in which the voices seem to flower from the orchestra and vice versa. Tenor Douglas Perry’s Gandhi – he virtually owned the role till Richard Croft sang it at The Met this spring – gives a mellifluous and touching performance, though the miking of alto Rhonda Liss’ Mrs. Alexander, while dramatic alright, is too far forward harsh. But Christopher Keene, sadly dead from AIDS, leads a cogent performance with the New York City Opera Chorus, and his singers in Act III’s extremely exposed sextet make it seem easy as pie.

The text and performance style of Glass’ opera about the heretic king AKHNATEN (1983) [ disc eight ] aim, like the in Sanskrit SATYAGRAHA, at divorcing and /or mirroring action(s) from words. The voice – countertenor Paul Esswood sings the pharaoh – is set within an umbrous ( no violins as in KOYAANISQATSI ) yet continuously shifting orchestral frame, and musical time and scale once again take center stage, in Davies and the Stuttgart State Opera and Chorus’ vigorous and deeply atmospheric account of this monumental yet very personal score.
You get a touch but only a touch of Glass’ wide-ranging efforts in moving pictures – other than his for Reggio — in disc ten, Filmworks, though Nonesuch’s PHLILIP ON FILM gives a better introduction and in depth survey of his work in this form. Still disc four has excerpts from his odd yet enchanting score, ETOLIE POLAIRE , for Francois de Menil and Barbara Rose’s 1977 doc MARK DI SUVERO, SCULPTOR. My favorite has always been ” Are Years What? ( for Marianne Moore ) ” for flute and soprano and tenor saxophone – Dickie Landry , with its startling and refreshing “break ” – rest — midstream. Disc ten is strangely unsastisfying – we don’t get bleeding chunks, but chunks nevertheless of scores both famous and obscure. But who could ever think, much less see Glass’ 1994 opera based on Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film LA BELLE ET LA BETE, as anything but new music wedded to the work of this way too gifted – who could ever pigeonhole Cocteau? -and deeply influential artist? Glass apparently identifies with him – both were outsiders even when they appeared to be movers and shakers within their own time – and Glass’ time is decidedly ours. But anyone curious about his recent film, concert, and theatre work should check out Orange Mountain Music’s catalog – as well as Nonesuch’s , which give a close-up view of this straightforward, extremely important, yet deeply elusive artist.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 12:41 pm and is filed under CD Review, Michael McDonagh, minimalism, Philip Glass. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.