Philip Glass

A year or so ago OMM started receiving some unsolicited remixes of Philip Glass works from young producer/musicians. I believe this is because in some circles Philip Glass is known as "the Godfather of Trance". The remixes I received were exciting interpretations of Philip's work.

The New York based string quartet Brooklyn Rider performs the complete Philip Glass string quartets including the early String Quartet No.1 (1966) and a world premiere recording of Glass s score to the 1997 film BENT starring Mick Jagger, Clive Owen, and Ian McKellen on this new 2-disc set titled Brooklyn Rider plays Philip Glass. Glass s string quartets include his score to the Samuel Beckett play Company (String Quartet No.2), the Paul Schrader film on the life of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima String Quartet No.3 Mishima and an elegiac remembrance of artist Paul Buczak in String Quartet No.4 Buczak. The fast-rising Brooklyn Rider is violinists Johnny Gandelsman, Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Eric Jacobsen. The group tours extensively in the USA and abroad.

In 1985, Philip Glass composed a 'dance-theater' work based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' as one of the last pieces written for the original Philip Glass Ensemble (keyboards and woodwinds.) A few years ago Norwegian filmmaker Jan Vardøen decided to make a film about the Poe’s story which is set in the Arctic Circle near the Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway. At the same time, Vardøen discovered Philip Glass Ensemble recording of the work. As part of his film, Vardøen conscripted the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra and arranger Alexander Waaktar to adapt the music for full symphony orchestra, voice, and synthesizer, all under the baton of Tim Weiss. The result is a dramatic new interpretation of a little known major Philip Glass work. This new recording from Orange Mountain Music marks the first recording of this dynamic piece in this new orchestral form.

Philip Glass' 1987 album Songs from the Trilogy is made up of brief selections from his three portrait operas, Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), and Akhnaten (1983). It gives a good idea of what the music from the operas sounds like, but at the same time it misrepresents what the music is actually about. In developing his "music with repetitive structures" (the description he preferred over "minimalism"), Glass was creating a new kind of experience, one in which the traditional temporal expectations of a piece of music are overturned, where changes happen incrementally and very slowly over a long (sometimes a very long) span of time.