Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Hourglass
Tirol Concerto (Piano Concerto No. 1) (2000)
Suite from The Hours (2002, arr. Michael Riesman)
Baroklyn/Simone Dinnerstein (piano)
rec. 2025, Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, New York City
Reviewed from a WAV download: 96 kHz/24-bit
Naïve V9238 [57]
There are pianists who arrive at Philip Glass and pianists who have lived alongside him, and Simone Dinnerstein belongs firmly to the second category. Glass wrote his Third Piano Concerto for her, after hearing her play Bach and Schubert in his garden. She gave its premiere in 2017 and recorded it the following year on Circles, set against a Bach keyboard concerto. That pairing was characteristic. For the better part of a decade Dinnerstein has declined to let Glass stand on his own: Circles placed him with Bach, A Character of Quiet with Schubert, Undersong among Couperin, Schumann and Satie. He has always been admitted to the company of her core repertoire and made to converse with it. Heard, in other words, as keyboard music continuous with the tradition rather than as a minimalist special case.
Hourglass is the first time Dinnerstein has devoted a programme to Glass alone, and it is worth saying at the outset that the move has the feel of a conclusion reached rather than a risk taken. Her playing here is unobtrusive in the truest sense: not self-effacing, but so thoroughly absorbed into the texture that one stops noticing the piano as a separate event and starts hearing it as one strand among several. She is, on this recording, the complete chamber musician as much as the concert soloist, and the contrast with Martin James Bartlett — who recorded the Tirol Concerto with the LGT Young Soloists in 2021 on Orange Mountain Music — is instructive. Bartlett works at the idiom; you can hear the effort of fitting a virtuoso temperament to music that does not especially want one. Dinnerstein simply inhabits it.
Behind that contrast lies a larger one, because there are broadly two ways to play Glass. The first treats the music as something that must be held together: the danger is sprawl, the repeating cells running on and the pulse going slack, and the performer’s task is control: clean execution, steady motion, structure never lost. It is the approach of Dennis Russell Davies, who like Dinnerstein directs from the keyboard and whose Stuttgart premiere recording (also on Orange Mountain) has effectively owned the work for two decades. He was rightly praised for keeping it neat and unfussy, its momentum intact, and that is a genuine virtue. The second way treats the music as something that must be allowed to live. It begins from a diagnosis — that a performance kept too well-regulated sounds merely mechanical, the pulse reliable but inert — and its task is to risk the opposite: to let the music ebb and gather and very nearly falter, so that its momentum feels not maintained but continually recovered. Its own danger is real enough, a looseness that forgets the music still has bones. It is a danger Dinnerstein never courts, and Hourglass makes the strongest case for this way of playing Glass that I know.
The programme raises a question the booklet circles without ever quite naming: does Glass write ‘concert music’ at all, or does he write material? Consider the provenance of what is on this disc. The Tirol Concerto was commissioned with support from a regional tourist board and folds Austrian folk music into its argument. It is a concerto partly as a deliverable. The Suite from ‘The Hours’ is (Oscar-nominated) film music shaped into a three-movement, concerto-like object by Glass’s music director Michael Riesman, on a joint commission from two American orchestras. And the film score itself was not purely original, drawing in earlier Glass, including material from Satyagraha and the solo-piano Metamorphosis. The chain of repurposing runs four layers deep before Baroklyn adds a fifth by re-voicing the whole thing. One could treat this as a charge against the music. I think it is closer to the truth to say the music was built for exactly this. It does not resist being moved; being movable is the point. As Dinnerstein’s own note observes, Glass, like Bach, recycles whatever forces and material are to hand. Neither composer writes music that begins in the physical fact of a particular instrument. That is precisely why it survives being moved.
Which brings us to The Hours, and to the reason it stands out here, though not, I think, for the reason one might expect. The temptation is to say the suite transcends its origins as screen music. The more interesting possibility is that it never had to. Look at what Glass was setting. Michael Cunningham’s novel – imaginative, certainly, though unembarrassed about its own derivation from Mrs Dalloway – is built throughout on threes and on the single day made to contain a whole life. Three women across three decades, patterned triads recurring at every level of the book. In the film Glass actually scored, Stephen Daldry’s three intercut timelines carry that architecture over intact. Glass’s idiom—the circling, the small repeating unit standing in for the long span—turns out to be uncannily congruent with it. The hourglass rather than the factory clock, to borrow Dinnerstein’s good distinction. Riesman’s suite is a medley, but a medley that lands on the source’s deepest structural principle: three movements, each a day, each a life. It was never really describing the images conventionally in the first place.
Finally, and most importantly, the playing throughout is magnificent. Dinnerstein and the musicians of Baroklyn — the ensemble she has built slowly and chosen for listening as much as for technique — are alert, independent-minded, and give every line its own breath and phrasing without ever allowing the whole to fray. The murmuration passage in the second movement of the Tirol, where the violins were asked to behave like a flock of starlings, comes off exactly as described, and it is the kind of effect that only an ensemble of genuine chamber musicians could bring off. The traffic runs both ways, too: the ear that made last year’s all-Bach Complicité, Baroklyn’s own arrangements and all (on Supertrain Records), is recognisably the ear at work here. I would go as far as to say this recording sets a new standard for how Glass might be played: not as a mechanism to be kept running, but as something made by people, in real time, listening hard.
Dominic Hartley
Other review: David Barker
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