BBC Concert Orchestra - Seeing The Light (recorded 26 Feb 2023)

Recent broadcast of a February concert from London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, themed around 'light'.  Starting off with Philip Glass' piece for the centenary of the Michelson-Morley experiment, the first half is rounded out with Peteris Vasks' Lonely Angel, introducing violinist Mari Samuelsen as the concert's featured soloist.  A great run of pieces after the interval, by Meredi, Guðnadóttir and Pärt further showcase Samuelsen, before the grand finale of Rautavaara's Angel Of Light symphony.  Great programme, brilliantly played.

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BBC Concert Orchestra with Mari Samuelsen - Glass, Higdon, Taylor-West, Perivolaris (live in London, 5 May 2022)

Broadcast concert from a month ago held in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London.  As well as the main attractions of the programme, the Glass and Higdon concertos, two commissioned pieces were given their premiere and introduced by their composers.  First up is Liam Taylor-West's Making Space, inspired by non-repeating mathematical patterns; the bright, bustling music made me think of Steve Reich's cityscapes.  Gaelic call-and-response hymn singing and forest regrowth combine next in Electra Periovolaris' A Forest Reawakens, an intriguing four-minute introduction to another young and promising composer.

Philip Glass' Violin Concerto then takes us back to the 80s, and the beginning of his embrace of more traditional classical forms, but still with the trademark gradually-shifting repetitive strucutures and a great showcase for the featured violinist Mari Samuelsen.  The second half of the concert is taken up by Jennifer Higdon's Concerto For Orchestra (2002), getting off to a whirlwind start before passing the spotlight round the strings, the soloists and percussion.  It's a great finish to a highly complementary programme of first-class musicianship and composing.

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BBC Concert Orchestra / James McVinnie - Rautavaara, Glass, Pärt, Jóhannsson etc (BBC Proms 2021)

Another great Proms concert, recorded a week ago and this time pairing the BBC Concert Orchestra with organist James McVinnie.  A well-selected programme of atmospheric modern orchestral music is punctuated by a couple of fantastic solo organ pieces, then both come together in the finale.

 

Einojuhani Rautavaara's chilly soundscape Cantus Arcticus is up first, the music woven around taped birdsong captured by Rautavaara in northern Finland in the early 70s.  A brief piece by Judith Weir is next: she describes Still, Glowing as "an attempt at ambient music".  The first feature for James McVinnie is Philip Glass' Mad Rush, in its original organ version - recording by Glass here, or on piano here.  The orchestra return with Arvo Pärt's Festina Lente.

No interval in this performance, so the orchestra continue on with two pieces from the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's Orphée album, reproducing their lovely melancholy in fine style.  In between them is another solo organ spotlight, this time one of Messiaen's Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité.  American composer Missy Mazzoli's Holy Roller is next, taking fragments of Tallis to create "a monument to a non-existent religion", then McVinnie joins the orchestra for Canadian Samy Moussa's incredible A Globe Itself Infolding to give a memorable conclusion to the programme.

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Arvo Pärt at SGTG: Spiegel Im Spiegel, etc

Jóhann Jóhannsson at SGTG: Fordlandia / Orphée

and lots of Philip Glass.

Reich, Glass, Nancarrow et al performed by London Sinfonietta (BBC Proms 2020)

A programme of "pulsing cityscapes" from the London Sinfonietta, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall sans audience on Tuesday 1 September.  Some wonderful, ear-bending sounds came out of this - as soon as the stately chords of Glass' Facades fade away, what comes next is a miniature for toy piano and toy boombox.  This piece is East Broadway by Julia Wolfe, one of the Bang On A Can founders - after her grand epic Flower Power earlier this year, it was nice to hear the contrast of something so brief and bizarre.

Orchestral arrangements of two of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies For Player Piano follow, with the expanded instrumentation really highlighting the fiendish complexity of Nancarrow's writing.  A spotlight for three more contemporary composers is next, with Tansy Davies' funk-influenced Neon, Edmund Finnis' renaissance/baroque-cut-and-paste In Situ and Anna Meredith's distorted bassoon piece Axeman.  The finale is Steve Reich's City Life, which more than ably demonstrates its title in the trademark pulse and orchestration, and in the sampled sounds from the streets of NYC.  These include voices used both in the style of Different Trains, where the cadence of the speech informs the melody, and in phased overlays like his early work Come Out.

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Philip Glass - Analog (2006 compilation, rec. 1975-81)

Compilation released by the Philip Glass archive label Orange Mountain Music, centered around the 1977 LP North Star which originally came out on Virgin Records.  North Star comprised of soundtrack music for a 1975 documentary about the sculptor/assemblage artist Mark Di Suvero, and as such contains much shorter pieces than any other Glass release of the era.

Listening to North Star, in fact, is like a series of miniature trailers for Einstein On The Beach (link below) - the preponderance of tracks based around electric organ and simple vocal phrases definitely points the way forward to Einstein.  There's some really lovely variations on the Glass sound of time too, such as River Run and the flute tapestry of Are Years What (For Marianne Moore).  Like Glassworks, this is an ideal album for listeners who might enjoy the early Philip Glass sound, but be put off by a single idea stretching across 20-odd minutes.

The bonus on Analog is Soho News, an EP from 1981 containing "two minor works originally written in the mid-70s".  The three parts of Dressed Like An Egg are in a similar vein to the organ/voice pieces on North Star, and the real treat is an early organ rendition of Mad Rush.  Perhaps best known as a piano piece since the release of Solo Piano (link below), it was originally intended to be an organ work, and is presented here in its full 16 minute recording (Soho News originally edited it down to seven minutes).

North Star, original LP cover, 1977

Soho News, original 12" cover, 1981

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Music With Changing Parts
Two Pages, Contrary Motion etc
Music In Twelve Parts
Einstein On The Beach
Dance Nos. 1-5
Solo Piano
Dance No. 4 (Christopher Bowers-Broadbent)
How Now, etc (Steffen Schleiermacher)
Glassworks (live 2017)
Symphony No. 3 (live 2020)

Philip Glass - Solo Piano (1989)

Been getting majorly reacquainted with this album of sublime, beautifully relaxing piano over the last few weeks, so it's well due a posting.  Just composer and instrument, nothing else.  Half an hour of gradually evolving meditations on Kafka, with some themes from his Thin Blue Line soundtrack.  Thirteen minutes of achingly gorgeous flowing waves originally written as an organ piece for the Dalai Lama's visit to New York City in 1981.  Then seven minutes of gospel-inflected loveliness written in collaboration with Allen Ginsberg (the version with his voice would appear the following year, on Hydrogen Jukebox).  I could listen to this album forever.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Music With Changing Parts
Two Pages, Contrary Motion etc
Music In Twelve Parts
Einstein On The Beach
Dance Nos. 1-5
Dance No. 4 (Christopher Bowers-Broadbent)
How Now, etc (Steffen Schleiermacher)
Glassworks (live 2017)
Symphony No. 3 (live 2020)

Bang On A Can All-Stars / BBC Concert Orchestra - Bang On! (recorded live, 28 Feb 2020)

A fantastic concert given last Friday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in which the BBC Concert Orchestra were paired with the Bang On A Can All-Stars.  The group's parent organisation Bang On A Can, founded in the late 80s, have performed works by Reich, Riley, Glass and many others, as well as a famous full-album cover of Brian Eno's Music For Airports.

John Adams' The Chairman Dances proves to be the perfect curtain-raiser for the show, played just by the BBC Concert Orchestra with great swing and verve - find the original recording here.  The main event concludes the first half of the concert, with the orchestra backing the All-Stars in the European premiere of Julia Wolfe's (one of the BOAC founders) Flower Power.  Written as a tribute to 1960s counterculture, it starts in woozy drones that reminded me a bit of Fausto Romitelli, before kicking into gear and embarking on a stunning journey through rock and psychedelia, dramatic orchestral evocations of protest and social upheaval, some gorgeous reflective passages and much more.

The group and orchestra play separately in the second half, with Bang On A Can All-Stars up first.  They play Horses Of Instruction, a work written for them in 1994 by a composer I only discovered last year, Steve Martland.  Like Martland's Babi Yar on that album, the influences of muscular, driving rock and Martland's teacher Louis Andriessen are both very much in evidence, but this work is much less dark in tone.  Made me think of a more melodic version of 90s King Crimson at times.  To close, the strings of the orchestra perform Philip Glass' Symphony No. 3.  I've largely avoided symphonic Glass over the years, but for all the received wisdom of this facet of his ouevre being interminable stodge, it was an enjoyable listen and a nice reflective comedown to end such a spectacular concert. Highly recommended, especially the Julia Wolfe centrepiece.

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Philip Glass - Two Pages, Contrary Motion, Music In Fifths, Music In Similar Motion (1994 compilation)

More early Philip Glass, as promised last Monday.  Following the 1971 release of the Changing Parts double-LP, the next additions to the composer's embryonic discography were Music In Similar Motion/Music In Fifths (rel. 1973, again on his own Chatham Square imprint), and Solo Music (rel. 1975 on the French label Shandar).  This Nonesuch CD reissue takes these four sides of vinyl and presents them in reverse order - presumably a programmatic decision to let the listener experience the gradually developing complexity of the music and addition of extra instruments.

So taking them in this order, first up is Two Pages (written 1967/8, rec. 1975), one of the earliest expressions of Glass' MO of expanding and contracting little units of composition, inspired by Indian music and in particular meetings with Ravi Shankar.  With subtle assistance from Michael Riesman on piano, Two Pages isn't actually solo music in the strictest sense, but the following Contrary Motion (written '74, rec.'75) definitely is, and has more harmonic complexity in its theoretically endless 'open form' experiment in Bach-like counterpoint.

On to the two ensemble pieces then, which actually featured in solo organ form on this blog a while back, as interpreted by Steffen Schleiermacher.  Music In Fifths (written '69, rec. '73) as presented here doesn't in fact feature the full Philip Glass Ensemble, just two saxophones alongside the composer's organ, but they fill out its tight structure quite nicely.  The full ensemble then arrive for the finale of Music In Similar Motion (written '69, rec. 71), which has the most eventful structure of all the four pieces here, as the different instrumental voices gradually introduce themselves and shape the changes in the piece.

Music In Similar Motion/Music In Fifths, original LP cover 1973

Contrary Motion/Two Pages, original LP cover 1975

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Philip Glass - Music With Changing Parts (1971)

Before there was Einstein On The Beach, before there were any parts of Music In Twelve Parts; before, in fact, there were any other recordings of Philip Glass' music available, there was the 1971 double-LP pictured below (later reissued as the uninterrupted hour-long CD pictured above).

This 1970 composition had been doing the rounds of NYC lofts and other art spaces on tour with an embryonic version of the Philip Glass Ensemble, sometimes running over two hours, when it was recorded for the composer's debut release on his own label.  The gradually expanding and contracting cells of composition that would become tightly controlled were noticeably looser at this stage, with no overall score, but simply 'unassigned lines' distributed among the ensemble.  Glass would control the major section changes from the organ, with a nod to the other musicians.  They were free to - not improvise per se, as Glass disliked that, but to bolster any new harmonic shapes that were emerging from the melting pot as they saw fit.

This gives Music With Changing Parts an organic feel closer to Terry Riley than anything Glass would go on to become world-renowned for.  The sound is rougher in texture too, not just in the occasionally audible limitations of the 1971 master recording, but in the grungy cheap electric organ hammering away, and the lack of finesse in the ensemble playing relative to how they'd sound just a few years later at the outset of Twelve Parts.  This is the Glass Ensemble at its most primitive and thrilling, creating a hypnotic hour of constantly-shifting music that contains all the seeds from which the composer's mature work would grow.  More next Monday, in a compilation of two more early LPs.

Original double-LP cover

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Philip Glass - Dance Nos. 1-5 (rec. 1979-86, rel. 1988)

In the aftermath of Einstein On The Beach's success and initial LP release, Philip Glass composed three 'Dances' for friend and choreographer Lucinda Childs, to be performed by his regular small ensemble.  Two of these, numbered 1 and 3, would comprise the follow-up to Einstein in Glass' discography (see LP cover below), and the remaining one would eventually be recorded in 1984 and appear as the closer to the 3LP/2CD set Dance Nos. 1-5 that was released in 1988.

Dance Nos. 1-5, which is today's post, interspersed these odd-numbered ensemble pieces with two solo organ works recorded in 1986.  Of these, Dance No. 4 became the best known and has been given several interpretations, including my personal favourite by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent.  The original take here, performed by the composer, is less grandiose and a bit more slow and deliberate, highlighting the gradual progression in the structure of the piece.  Dance No. 2, performed here by Michael Riesman, is an electric organ piece of similar length but closer in conception to the music of Einstein On The Beach, as if a piece from the opera had been stripped of all instruments but the keyboard.

Closer still to the sound of Einstein, and in some ways prefiguring Koyaanisqatsi, are Dances 1, 3 and 5.  Dance No. 1 is a flowing, rippling ocean of flutes and piccolo; No. 3 a chunkier, funkier sax-led work that is lots of fun to listen to.  Lastly, Dance No. 5 is a best-of-both-worlds that combines flute and sax, and has some structural similarities to the organ piece, No. 2.  All in all, an essential collection in Glass' discography for anyone wanting to tour the waystations between his most famous works of the late 70s through to late 80s.

Dance Nos. 1 & 3 - LP cover (1980)

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Philip Glass - Einstein On The Beach (1979)

The big breakthrough moment for mid-70s Philip Glass, composer, plumber and taxi driver, started when he agreed to collaborate with avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson.  Agreeing to work on a non-narrative portrait of Albert Einstein, Glass spent most of 1975 writing to a series of Wilson's storyboards.  Einstein On The Beach's four Acts, linked by five short 'Knee Plays', totaled around five hours in duration and premiered in France in July 1976.

Three years later, this first complete recording by Glass' Ensemble was released.  Most of the individual pieces had to be significantly shortened by necessity to fit on to four LPs, but you still get enough of a sense of what an epic work this is even at just two and a half hours.  All of Glass' experiments from the late 60s and early 70s into harmonic, repetitive and additive structures finds fruition here - the epic Music In Twelve Parts (admittedly only part-released in the 70s) now looks like a warmup for Einstein On The Beach.

As with that earlier work, the vocal text for Einstein was written as solfège (do-re-mi etc), intended, as were the chanted numbers, to be placeholder text, but ultimately kept in the finished opera, only enhancing its beautiful absurdity.  Texts on a variety of odd subjects, most of them seemingly random and cut-up non-sequiturs, were contributed by Christopher Knowles, Lucinda Childs and Samuel M Johnson.  On stage, Wilson's staging and choreography would fill in some of the gaps in understanding, but on record Einstein is still a hypnotic and joyous experience; no further explanation is needed.  And you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the closing two minutes, as the 'Bus Driver' character from the opera's final Knee Play recites Johnson's 'Two Lovers On A Park Bench' monologue.

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Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4

Arvo Pärt, Peter Maxwell Davies, Philip Glass - Trivium (rec. 1990, rel. 1992)

Time to crank up the speakers or headphones as far as they (and you) can tolerate, and enjoy an hour of total sonic immersion in the playing of English organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent.  He recorded this programme for ECM in 1990 on the organ of Grossmünster church in Zurich as a "performance about time and space", focusing on just three modern composers.

Four stunning pieces by Arvo Pärt are followed by two short palete-cleansers in the form of Peter Maxwell-Davies' arrangements of 16th-century Scottish hymns, before Bowers-Broadbent truly blows the roof off in two great Glass works.  Firstly, there's an organ arrangement of the finale from the opera Satyagraha.  Then finally, Glass' 80s organ piece Dance No. 4 gets the full-bodied workout in deserves.  If I knew more about how the musical structure of this masterpiece develops, I'd briefly describe it - but then that might detract from the sheer majesty of just letting yourself get lost in it for its 15 sublime minutes.

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Philip Glass - Glassworks (composed 1981; new live recording 2017)

I am terrible at Photoshop - feel free to substitute your own artwork, or use original below.

A bit remiss of me to overlook the legendary 'music with repetitive structures' composer on this blog when his 80th birthday celebrations came around in January, but better late than never.  Here's a highlight from the 'Glass at 80: Total Immersion Weekend' that the BBC put on; a fresh performance of one of Glass' most deliberately accessible works that he composed in 1981 to reach a wider audience, even releasing a special 'Walkman mix' for the cassette edition.

Glassworks, performed live at Milton Court, London on 28th January 2017 by the Guildhall New Music Ensemble, remains an ideal entry point to the composer's vast catalogue, and just sounds absolutely gorgeous - much of it mellow and evocative, turning away from the more harsh minimalism of his early works towards something lush and romantic.  The two odd ones out, of course, are the frenetic second and fourth movements, Floe and Rubric, ensuring that Glassworks doesn't get too laid back.  You can hear exactly where Glass was about to go with his next major project (and first big soundtrack), especially in Rubric, which was actually slated for Koyaanisqatsi but didn't make the cut.

original album cover, 1982

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Previously posted at SGTG: 
Music In Twelve Parts
Early works performed by Steffen Schleiermacher

Philip Glass - Music In Twelve Parts (comp. '71-'74, rec. '75 and '87, rel. '88)

Time to work on the Glass deficit on this blog - so how about something featuring the master himself leading his early ensemble, rather than an (admittedly great) interpreter.  The three-hour Music In 12 Parts has been recorded three times to date; this is the earliest, half-recorded in 1975 then finished off in 1987, sounding admirably seamless when you listen to it right through.  I definitely recommend doing so if you've got the time to devote to it - although there's three downloads below, corresponding to the CDs in the original box set, I've set all the track numbers to run consecutively if you want to pop everything into one folder.

'Music In 12 Parts' was originally just the first 18 minutes, the title merely referring to the way the 1971 piece had been scored.  After listening to this wonderfully languid experiment in minimalist stasis, constantly changing when you examine it closely like a living organism under a microscope, a friend asked where the other 11 parts were - inspiring Glass to write them.

From here in, the tempo picks up and largely stays there, running through all sorts of twists and turns in melody, harmony and rhythm.  In the knottiest, rollercoaster-like runs, there's clear precursors of Glass' iconic Einstein On The Beach, most notably towards the end of Part 8.  The finale, however, is arguably the most fun to listen to as it gradually builds its long melody one link at a time; according to Glass, a bit of a sideswipe at having to learn 12-tone music theory in his youth and finally using it for once.

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Disc 2
Disc 3

Philip Glass - How Now, etc (Steffen Schleiermacher organ/piano, rel. 2010)

Haven't actually posted any Glass on this blog yet, so here we go.  The three works on this collection were composed in the late 60s, and are among the best representations of the composer's early, austere and challenging style.  Disliking the term 'minimalist', Philip Glass always referred to himself as a "composer of music with repetitive structures", and for me, German composer/pianist/organist Steffen Schleiermacher is one of the very best Glass interpreters who can really bring out the simplicity, and then complexity by addition, subtraction and mutation, of these structures.

Music In Similar Motion and Music In Fifths, both composed in 1969, were originally written and recorded as works for a small ensemble, but on this recording Schleiermacher strips them down to just a single organ to great effect; the gradually evolving patterns are laid bare and the single instrument arguably enhances the hypnotic potential.  In between these two on this programme is a piano version of How Now (1968), which I also have on a recording of Glass' debut concert performance (released on his archival imprint).  On that occasion, Glass performed How Now on organ for a patience-stretching half hour, but the piece is transformed in Schleiermacher's hands into a calm, extended meditation that Erik Satie might've been proud of.  If you're looking for the minimal, engrossing magic of early Philip Glass, you'll scarcely find it more perfectly expressed than on this release.

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