One Way Glass

In 2001, Philip Glass composed the music for the film Naqoyqatsi: Life as War. It was the last film in a trilogy by director Godfrey Reggio that featured only images and music. When the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra invited Glass to be a creative director for its Boundless Series during the 2011-12 season, Glass thought of his cello concerto and its possible life beyond film. The CSO commissioned the Cello Concerto No.2 - Naqoyqatsi and gave the composer the opportunity to have it reborn as a proper concerto. The resulting recording is drawn from the live performances. This dynamic seven-movement work is conducted here by long-time Glass champion Dennis Russell Davies with soloist Matt Haimovitz.

For this second album from British alternative rockers Glass Animals, the band created a cast of fictitious characters from all walks of life and built different stories around them, turning each story into a song. The group's singer and songwriter Dave Bayley invented elaborate backgrounds for every character, imagining their jobs, hobbies, homes and styles of furniture, which helped him better understand their thinking in order to write these songs. Actors were then hired to portray the characters on the cover art and in videos. The album includes the top 20 alternative radio hit "Life Itself".

Philip Glass' one act chamber opera In the Penal Colony was composed in 2000. The libretto is by Rudolph Wurlitzer and based on a story by Franz Kafka.

The organ music of Philip Glass presents some of his most significant and extended minimalist works. Dance 2 and Dance 4 are the two solo organ movements of a five-part work composed in the early 1970s. The arrangement of the Act III Finale to his opera Satyagraha dates from 1980 and is one of the most famous and familiar pieces in all Glass. The sheer accuracy and concentration of Kevin Bowyer's performances guarantee that this music is heard to its best effect on the splendid 1995 Marcussen organ at Tonbridge School.

Besides psychedelic, or unusual instruments I am big fan of naturally harmonically sounding objects too. To catch pure, soft, calming, kind of bellish, winterly sound of glass I choose two wine glasses I have found and used at my mom´s home. I have used my fingertips, knuckles and also a wooden stick to hit, pip, stroke the glasses softly and also strongly. This way I obtained several completely different sample sets and built wide offer of wine glass sound kits. Some kits contained more (up to 7 x round robin) samples, some 2 or 3 dynamics layers… Some were made just from one beautiful sample. If you like this kind of sounds and are looking for nicely sounding glasses, try my Wine Glass sample pack. I am sure that among 40 kits made from different samples, you will find more than one you will like. I personally believe, they are all of good use.

The American Virtuoso presents a recital by American pianist Paul Barnes. His third release for Orange Mountain Music, it features piano music by American composers including the world premiere recording of Barnes' transcription of Philip Glass's Piano Concerto No 2 'After Lewis and Clark' - the full version of which he also premiered on OMM in 2006 with the Northwest Chamber Orchestra under Ralf Gothóni. The focus of this first-rate solo recording are Samuel Barber's landmark "Sonata for piano" of 1950, described by Vladimir Horowitz as "the first truly great native work in the form", and his haunting "Ballade" and "Nocturne". And it ends with two colourful contrasting pieces from the mid-1990s by Joan Tower from "No Longer Very Clear", inspired by John Ashberry's eponymous poem.