Glass reviews

Prolific opera composer Philip Glass has adapted to the changing scene by latterly focusing his attention on smaller-scale works. The Trial, composed for Music Theatre Wales who present this premiere recording, features just eight singers, and an ensemble of 12 players.

This outstanding CD from the Istanbul-based Borusan Quartet explores a diverse collection of modern string quartets with tremendous spirit and poise. Arvo Pärt’s restless Summa (1977), an early example of the composer’s ‘tintinnabuli’ style, opens the disc. It is paired with Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 2 (1983), originally composed to accompany a staged adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novel Company and here performed with apt intensity and precision.

As Philip Glass celebrates his 80th birthday this year, his reputation continues to grow with increasing numbers of instrumentalists recasting his music to increase its accessibility. Aguas da Amazonia was originally produced in collaboration with Brazilian group UAKTI, who blend traditional instrumentation with sounds made from everyday materials. Conductor Kristjan Järvi commissioned composer Charles Coleman to rearrange the work for symphony orchestra, performed here by two of Järvi’s four ensembles: the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Absolute Ensemble.

Philip Glass started writing his piano etudes in the 1990s, adding to and revising the collection until 2012. He was reportedly drawn to the project for the same reason that many pianists seek out studies – to improve his technical abilities.

The Australian soprano saxophonist Amy Dickson’s first dalliance with the motif-driven music of Philip Glass was an arrangement of his Violin Concerto. Like other Glassian arrangers such as harpists Lavinia Meijer and Floraleda Sacchi, Dickson has had to develop bespoke techniques to make the transcriptions successful. While the repetitive patterns in Glass’s writing are challenging for violinists, they are virtually impossible for woodwind – unless you can master circular breathing, as Dickson has.

The works making up the two books of Etudes began to emerge piecemeal in the 1990s. Six studies from book one were composed in 1994 for the 50th birthday of pianist and conductor Dennis Russell Davies, whose association with Glass goes back some four decades. As further compositions emerged the second set began to build up, culminating in the commissioning of the final three by the Perth Festival to mark Glass’s 75th birthday in 2012.

Philip Glass has always been fascinated by people who radically challenged the beliefs of their time: his early operas examined the contributions of Gandhi, Einstein and Akhnaten. More recently he tackled Kepler. And back in 2002 he turned to Galileo Galilei; this is the first recording of that opera.

In Peter Stephan Jungk’s fictionalised story of Walt Disney’s last months, cartoon colours and fairy-tale endings fall away to expose the grim realities faced by a man with cancer and a corporation in decline. Jungk expands on the rumour, circulated after Disney’s death in 1966, that the business magnate wanted to be immortal (like Mickey Mouse)and requested he be cryogenically preserved.

Glass came to the symphony late. His first, the Low Symphony, was premiered in 1992 when Glass was 45. He has since continued to address this historically-loaded form and has now crashed the barrier of superstition around writing a Ninth Symphony: his Tenth was premiered this August in Aix-en-Provence.

Strong stomachs are needed for Glass’s 2000 opera adapted from Franz Kafka’s chilling short story. In the Penal Colony tells of a machine for torture and execution, operated by the last remaining upholder of the former regime that devised it. This officer is not just obeying orders but suffused with pride; he envies his victims their supposed redemption.

The three stage pieces that Philip Glass drew in the 1990s from sources by Jean Cocteau are among his most highly regarded and widely performed.

Transcriptions have a venerable and respectable history: from Bach downwards, many composers readily adapted their own and others’ works for different instruments, with musically successful results. Nevertheless, since (one assumes and hopes) composers think carefully about the peculiar characteristics of the instruments they score for, a change of instrumentation will inevitably affect the character of the music.