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.

The emotional sweep of Philip Glass

Philip Glass: Piano Etudes (2 CDs)

Philip Glass wrote his 20 Piano Etudes as individual works over the period 1991 to 2012, but he gave the concept of playing them together as a larger work credibility with his involvement in the performance of all 20 during one evening at the 2014 Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. In his review of that event Steven W Thrasher said that with these works "America’s greatest living composer stakes his claim for immortality." This new Brilliant Classics 2 CD-set of the Etudes by the Dutch pianist Jeroen Van Veen is the first of two releases of this repertoire at the end of 2017; watch for Jenny Lin's version to come along real soon. We're extraordinarily lucky to have such fine pianists playing this music!

I've been reading the Philip Glass memoir Words Without Music, a truly marvellous book, when I came across this passage about his early musical interests:

Berg, the Austrian composer who had been a student of Schoenberg’s, was my favorite. I became very familiar with his music, which had a more romantic feel and much more of an emotional sweep. It was beautiful music, and not as strict as Schoenberg (Webern was even more strict).

I think this is a key issue when it comes to listening to the Etudes.  Van Veen often highlights the emotional sweep of the music, playing with a freedom that belies the absolutely wrong-headed but still popular stereotype of Glass's music as being machine-like and repetitive. He takes some of these works at extraordinarily slow tempos, sometimes to a worrying extent. Again, though, I look to the Glass memoir, and his discussion of SLOW:

With both [conductor Wilhelm] Furtwängler and [director Bob] Wilson, the metronome clicks plunge down well below the comfort level of the human heartbeat. And what these truly great and profound artists reveal to us is a world of immense, immeasurable beauty.

Here's an extreme example of this; Van Veen takes nearly 15 minutes to play the 7th Etude, in A minor. Meanwhile, Maki Namekawa (in her fine 2014 Orange Mountain Music release) zips through it in 6 and a half minutes, while Jenny Lin takes 8-1/2. I can see the theoretical value in the long slow build-up with a strong release later in the piece, and Glass's sad coda as played by Van Veen packs a strong emotional punch here. But I fear he may have stretched things out a bit too much in this case.


I rather prefer Van Veen's version of the next work, no. 8. This is also taken at a stately tempo, but in this case it's to the benefit of the work, with the really rather pretty release after each statement of the stern opening. What an amazing piece, so foreboding and unyielding and then so soft and romantic.

The many permutations of Glass's music results in a really wide range of interpretations, and I think that's part of his genius. Each new concert, each new recording, provides another chance to gain a new appreciation for his genius.

Glass recently had a fascinating conversation with Paul Holdengraber at the New York Public Library, which you can listen to here. I highly recommend Paul's Live at the NYPL and #PhoneCallFromPaul podcasts.

Bach the Terminal Point

Heitor Villa-Lobos called Bach "...a kind of universal folkloric source, rich and profound."  He mined a particularly rich Bachian vein throughout his career, as have so many other composers, including Mozart, Chopin, Debussy.  "Study Bach," said Brahms, "there you will find everything."  One way to pay back this influence is to write music in homage: Villa's Bachianas Brasileiras, Stokowski's orchestral adaptations of preludes and fugues, Shostakovich's great Preludes and Fugues for piano, Penderecki's St. Luke Passion. There are hundreds, thousands, of others.

For this project Matt Haimovitz commissioned six composers - Philip Glass, Du Yun, Vijay Iyer, Roberto Sierra, David Sanford, and Luna Pearl Woolf - to write music for solo cello that would naturally lead into six different movements from the Solo Suites. In a process that Bach the every-day professional musician would have found familiar, these commissions interrupted the composers' current work - on Glass's opera Appomattox and Woolf's opera Better Gods - or started a back-and-forth collaboration between composer and performer, as happened between Haimovitz and Iyer. The composers' ideas encouraged Haimovitz to explore new techniques: microtonality in the music of Du Yun, the jazz bassist's repertoire of pizzicato and a different forms of scordatura with David Sanford, and an exploration of the five-string cello piccolo in the work of his partner Luna Pearl Woolf. He uses a variety of bows - Baroque and modern - throughout. None of this trial-and-error and technical innovation gets in the way of the music; it all sounds completely natural and organic. There is similarly no jarring transition between the new music and Bach, which is a tribute to the composers, the performer, and genius of Bach himself.

As with all the best encounters between artists, the more each composer focusses on Bach the more personal the music becomes. Haimovitz is demonstrating in these commissions and his superb Bach performances the truth of Borges' statement in his essay Kafka and His Precursors: "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."



"Bach is a terminal point," Albert Schweitzer once said. "Nothing comes from him; everything merely leads up to him." So all music in homage to Bach is really a kind of overture.

The Pentatone CD will be released September 9, 2016.

Superb Adams and Glass from Canada

From October 20, 2010:

Composer John Adams has called the two piano pieces China Gates and Phrygian Gates "my opus ones,... my first coherent statements in a new language". Written in 1977 and 1978, they have a theoretical framework as complex as Schoenberg's or Bach's, but they sound completely organic, as if produced by some natural process.

Adams calls Phrygian Gates "a behemoth of sorts". The work requires a pianist gifted with significant technical abilities, in much the same way as Liszt's B minor Sonata or Villa-Lobos's Rudepoema. Such skills are on display in David Jalbert's fine new recording from Canada's ATMA label. He has the dexterity to manage Adams' separate-hand waves (a much more complicated and more musical version of patting your head and rubbing your stomach), and he can turn on a dime when Adams abruptly shifts modes, as a gate (analogous to logic gates in computers) changes its state. As well, he has the stamina to dilineate Adams' architecture built from long arches of sound. China Gates uses similar ideas but is much less complex. It has a delicacy that the larger piece doesn't have, and Jalbert brings out plenty of beauty from this simplicity.

The Orphee Suite by Philip Glass was transcribed for piano by Paul Barnes, based on Glass's 1991 chamber opera, which was inspired by the great 1950 film by Jean Cocteau. Jalbert's version of this dramatic music is preferable to Barnes' own recording, released on Orange Mountain in 2003. It seems to me more incisive, less sentimental. As well, the ATMA disc has exceptional sound.

David Jalbert's 2008 recording of the Shostakovitch Preludes and Fugues is a favourite of mine. It was, quite rightly, very well received, and this new disc should bring similar praise.