Philip Glass The Hours Soundtrack

You can see what Philip Glass liked about the harp in his music. On one hand, it’s a close substitute for a piano, which is involved in the originals of all three of these transcriptions. The excerpts from The Hours (tracks 7-12) were transcribed from a piano version of the original Nicole Kidman film soundtrack score, and unsurprisingly Meijer said that of the three works, that one gave her the most trouble.

Canadian violinist Angèle Dubeau and her ensemble La Pietà pay homage to Philip Glass with this disc of some of his music for strings, plus arrangements of other works of his. The arrangements are by Michael Reisman, who has collaborated closely with Glass since the period of Einstein on the Beach, so they are idiomatic and persuasively transfer the works to a new medium. Two of his arrangements, the Overture to La Belle et la Bête and The Hours Suite, taken from the film soundtrack, include an amplified arsenal of instruments, including piano, harp, and celeste.

This elegantly packaged 10 disc retrospective surveys four decades of work by Philip Glass, from his earliest solo pieces to his world-renowned operas to his Oscar-nominated film scores. In music, words and pictures, it traces the evolution, as critic Tim Page puts it in his liner notes essay, of 'the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music-simultaneously.' The long-awaited release of this set follows this past spring's triumphal new staging of Glass's 1980 Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Composer Thomas Newman has proven himself a true master at invoking an atmosphere of melancholic nostalgia on films like The Shawshank Redemption, Road to Perdition, The Green Mile… Newman’s sound world goes beyond the world of the film soundtrack and extends into the minimalism of American composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as instrumental sonorities experimentation of Morton Feldman and Henry Cowell.