Philip Gorsk

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.

Going by this album, Phil Lynott would have had a lot in common with Bob Geldof, with both of them writing songs that strove for memorable hooks and related to growing up in the rough end of Ireland. The Philip Lynott Album has some surprisingly sweet moments, considering Lynott's hard-rocking past with Thin Lizzy. It generated a bona fide European pop hit in a remodeled version of "Yellow Pearl" (co-written by Midge Ure of Ultravox), a sarcastic attack on Asian marketing methods.

The music on this disc represents one of several collaborations between American minimalist composer Philip Glass and experimental Brazilian percussion group Uakti (say WOK-chee). The members of Uakti make their own instruments, both conventional and invented. Their collaboration with Glass is not simply a matter of performance – in this work, commissioned by a Brazilian dance company in 1993, they actually adapted Glass' materials for their own instruments. The first nine movements of Aguas da Amazonia (Waters of Amazonia) consist of the names of Brazilian rivers; the tenth movement, "Metamorphosis I," was added later, with instrumentation similar to the first nine.

Orange Mountain Music presents this new limited edition 11 disc boxed set - The Symphonies by Philip Glass. This collection features conductor Dennis Russell Davies who has arranged the commission of nine of ten Glass symphonies, leading the orchestras over which he has presided during the past 15 years including the Bruckner Orchester Linz, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonieorchester Basel, and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. This collection is the fruit of a 20 year collaboration between Glass and Davies and showcases a wide variety within this surprising body of work by Glass.

This low-budget Philip Glass opera, Les enfants Terribles, is based on a novel and play by Jean Cocteau, forming the third ring in Glass' trilogy of works devoted to the elaborate personal mythology of the great French visionary. Foregoing the controversial and dualistic 1949 film of Les enfants Terribles made by Jean-Pierre Melville, Glass decided to realize the visual element through a collaboration with choreographer Susan Marshall, re-creating Cocteau's story as a "dance opera." Les enfants Terribles is the most compelling Glass score beheld in many years.

The soundtrack to Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line emphasizes story over music; the interviews which make up the majority of the film – a crusading effort which led to the the release of its subject, Randall Adams, from a Texas prison – are presented on record as they were on screen, with Glass' chamber orchestra music hovering in the background. The result is a soundtrack which comes remarkably close to capturing the power of its source film; even without the moving images, this is a chilling document.