Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Solo
Glassworks Opening (1982)
Mad Rush (1979, originally Fourth Series Part 4 for organ)
Metamorphosis 1, 2, 3 and 5 (1988)
Truman Sleeps (1998)
Philip Glass (piano)
rec. 2021, the composer’s home, New York City
Orange Mountain Music OMM0168 [54]
Philip Glass is one of the most performed of contemporary composers. A pioneer of minimalist music in the 1960s, he has written in almost every genre. His early works were written largely for his own Philip Glass Ensemble in which he was one of the keyboard players. In the late 1970s, he began writing for symphony orchestra and there are now fourteen symphonies and twenty-four operas. The biographical operas Satyagraha and Akhnaten are regularly performed worldwide. While not a virtuoso in the league of Rachmaninov or Prokofiev, he is a compelling performer and his writing for piano has had a profound effect on writing for that instrument. Pianists of the stature of Yuja Wang include his works in their concerts.
During the Covid lockdowns the composer found himself in his NYC house with time to practice the piano: “What I found most interesting in coming back to many of these pieces is that something has changed. The music remains the same, but I have changed, the world has changed, the way people hear, including myself, has changed. That change, or metamorphosis, is what interests me.”
The material for all of the works is fundamentally simple. There are slowly changing chords, endearing diatonic melodies, and the interplay of three notes played against two notes but taking the same time, a favourite device of Romantic composers from Chopin onwards. Add to these some rapid flourishes in semiquavers and that is the musical material. When I first heard them many years ago, I was quite dismissive of them, thinking them simple-minded and naïve. Then I bought the music and started playing them and came to realise what masterpieces of content, time and pacing they were. They also carry immense emotional weight which far exceeds the notes on the page. Pure magic!
Glass has recorded all the works on this disc before, but these new recordings do find him, in his 80s, finding new, subtle nuances in the scores and rethinking of some of the tempi. The most radical of these is in Mad Rush. The work was originally created for the Dalai Lama’s first public speech in New York at the Cathedral of St John The Divine. For that event, Glass wrote an open-ended score for organ that he could play as the Dalai Lama entered the vast space. Later, it was drastically rearranged as this solo piano work in seven clearly defined repeating sections. Overall there is the shape of ternary form ABA to the work. Glass has said the title could refer to the play of the wrathful and peaceful deities in Tibetan Buddhism. His 1989 recording for Sony came in at 13:44, whereas this version is almost three minutes longer. It does not sound too slow, but then neither does the 1989 recording sound rushed. It is mainly in his articulation of the semiquaver passages that time is gained. All of this is done with a great care to the overall shape of the work and in this context is just right. The work can clearly stand a wide range of tempi as a performance Glass gave at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in 2008 lasts only 6:30. The turbulent passages where the evenness of symmetrical time signatures are upset by occasional asymmetrical bars are wonderfully handled.
There are five metamorphosis of which Glass records four here. They were all inspired by Kafka’s famous tale of a man who turns into an insect. Some were for a stage play and some found their way into the 1988 film The Thin Blue Line. Metamorphosis 4 may have been missed out ,as it is rather wilder than the others. The four here all convey a feeling of timeless melancholy. The way the composer times the subtly dissonant chords and phrases the simple melodies is painfully beautiful.
The two short works which bookend the programme are established classics. Opening, from the 1982 Glassworks, is better on the original disc than here. There the interplay of 3 against 2 is cleaner and the piano mechanism is smoother. The extract from The Truman Show shows just why Glass has had such a successful career as a composer for film. It is dramatic and poignant but does not give you the whole story. We are left wanting more.
The cardboard case with a portrait of the composer on the cover is nicely designed and has a lovely tactile feel. Instead of a booklet with notes we get photographs of the composer at his piano. For more information you need to go to Glass’s website.
There is something emotional about hearing these works played by the composer at his home, on the piano on which they were composed – but it is not the greatest piano; the lower notes sometimes lack depth and the upper one’s resonance, and his home is not a recording studio. There are better sounding recordings notably Jeroen van Veen who specialises in minimalist piano music (review). That said, this is a true artist at play, just imagine if we could hear Bach, Beethoven or Mozart playing their works.
Paul RW Jackson
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