Philip Glass

Orange Mountain Music and the Metropolitan Opera are proud to announce the release of Philip Glass’s opera SATYAGRAHA across a variety of media. SATYAGRAHA portrays Gandhi’s years in South Africa during the time he developed his tools for social transformation through nonviolence. Captured at the 2011 revival of the work, the production was directed by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch and starred Richard Croft as Gandhi along with a stellar cast with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra & Chorus under Dante Anzolini. Sung in Sanskrit from texts drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, the opera dramatically portrays the vocal text was by Constance DeJong with book by Philip Glass and Constance DeJong. The Met Opera’s co-production with the English National Opera was heard in New York in 2008 and 2011 and in London in 2007, 2013, and 2013.

This second volume of works features two orchestral scores by composer Philip Glass. The first score, "Days and Nights in Rocinha" (A Dance for Dennis Russell Davies and Orchestra) premiered in Vienna in 1998. The 23 minute work is Philip Glass' homage and musical tribute to a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro where the composer spent many summers. The second work, the 27 minute "Persephone" (TSE), is a five movement work for orchestra and chorus. It was conceived and recorded for Robert Wilson's theater installations of the same name in the mid-1990's.

From the Philip Glass Archive – Vol. 2: Orchestral Music represents the second release in a series discs to be released on Orange Mountain Music from the vast archive of recordings made in the last 40 years of Philip Glass’ incredible recording career. These recordings span the entire range of Philip Glass’ compositional activities and will include music for film, theater, dance, and concert hall in a wide variety of scores including chamber music, solo instruments and orchestral works.

When making a film, I play music constantly during "dailies" — the nightly screenings of the previous day's shooting. I test all kinds of music against the image, searching for the elusive "sound" of the picture.
In the case of The Truman Show, since it is the story of a live television program, I was also determining the music that the show's creator, Christof, would have chosen.

In 1982 Philip Glass became the first composer since Aaron Copland to join the CBS Masterworks label. Glass had formed the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968, but it wasn't until his opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) that he achieved great critical and popular success. His first album for Masterworks, Glassworks, tripled all sales projections, pleasing audiences, critics and Glass himself: "I'm very pleased with it, the way it's received in performance. The pieces seem to have an emotional quality that everyone responds to, and they work very well as performance pieces."

"Alter Ego" ensemble performs two of Philip Glass's minimalistic works: "Music in the Shape of Square and "600 Lines". The works on this disc are reissues of two CDs originally put out on the Italian Stradivarius label, so the Orange Mountain Label deserves credit for re-releasing them so they can find a wider audience.