Philip Glass

The Grid features a program of Philip Glass's most well-known music hand-selected by organist James McVinnie and adapted especially for the sounds of the Arp Schnitger Organ of the Michaelskerk in Zwolle Holland. It produces a richer and deeper sound than the farfisa keyboard organs played by the original Philip Glass Ensemble of the 1970's.

Philip Glass' long-time champion Dennis Russell Davies teams with pianist maki Namekawa to perform Glass' music for piano. This release includes the premiere recording of "Four Movements for Two Pianos" by Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa which the two pianists played at the Ruhr Piano Festival in 2008. The album also includes Davies' performing the original six Glass piano études, and Namekawa playing three selections from Glass' score to The Hours.

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.

In May 2006, Leonard Cohen published his first collection of poetry in 22 years, Book of Longing, having previously used some of the material as songs on his most recent albums, Ten New Songs (2001) and Dear Heather (2004). The book touched on many of the themes he had explored throughout his writing career, including spirituality (he had spent part of his time between books as a postulant at a Buddhist monastery), eroticism, and self-deprecating humor. On June 1, 2007, at the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Ontario, composer Philip Glass premiered his song cycle based on Book of Longing, which is here given a two-CD recording. Cohen is present on the album speaking (not singing) some of his poems, and Glass also has set some of them to music, with singing by a soprano (Dominique Plaisant), a mezzo-soprano (Tara Hugo), a tenor (Will Erat), and a bass-baritone (Daniel Keeling).

"A Descent into the Maelström", Edgar Allan Poe's vertiginous short story of being swept into a huge and terrible whirlpool by a raging hurricane that "the oldest seaman in Norway never experienced" was transformed into a Musical Dance/Theatre piece by Philip Glass and collaborators, dancer/choreographer Molissa Fenley, set designer Eamon D'Arcy and theatre director Matthew Maguire.