Organic, powerful Glass

Philip Glass: 20 Etudes for Piano, 2 CDs

Here we are again. Two releases of Philip Glass's great cycle of Etudes for Piano in November 2017: this Steinway & Sons album by Jenny Lin follows Jeroen Van Veen's for Brilliant Classics, which was released earlier this month. These two discs emphasize the stature of this composer and the importance of this music. Though the earliest Etudes began as studies to help Glass improve his technique as a pianist, the set as a whole now represents a landmark in 21st century music.

Lin's version is significantly faster than Van Veen's, cooler and lighter and more mercurial. This cuts against Glass's own focus on the emotional content of his music, but I find Lin's reading totally convincing. In Van Veen's more romantic approach, the emotion sweeps us up, while Lin's grows slowly in subtle shifts. As Glass says about his music from the late 60s and early 70s, "It was not meant to be mindless, but to be organic and powerful, and mindful, too."

The trick of that music was that it allowed the attention to form around a series of successive events that became almost unnoticeable - around the function of listening to something that seemed as if it were not changing, but was actually changing all the time. (Words Without Music)

Jenny Lin has been involved in the one-evening events where a number of pianists including Glass himself play all 20 Etudes. She'll join Glass, Aaron Diehl, Jason Moran and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes in this program at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in March of 2018.

This album will be released on November 17, 2017.