Shape of Nature

On 30 June 1999, the ensemble Alter Ego performed a concert of works by Philip Glass at the Opera Paese Gallery in Rome, one of the most innovative musical venues in the city and where Alter Ego has played regularly since 1996. Glass himself was present at this performance which was a replica of his own famous debut concert at the New York Film-Makers Cinemateque in September 1968. Under the guidance of Pietro Fortuna, the artists of the Opera Paese Gallery faithfully reconstructed the geometric installations which Glass had originally called for at that first performance. And over thirty years later, the audience in Rome gave the concert the same positive, enthusiastic reception it had enjoyed in New York — to the extent that Glass himself was suprised, as indeed he was by the modernity and abstract nature of several of his early compositions which he had neither played nor heard since that time.