Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Violin Concerto. Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten
Company
Born in Chicago in 1937 to Jewish immigrant parents, the
American composer Philip Glass began his musical studies on the flute and
violin, going on to study with Steve Reich at the Juilliard School in New York,
and later with Darius Milhaud in Aspen and Nadia Boulanger in Paris. By the
1980s Glass had already made a considerable reputation for himself in the field
of composition now generally referred to as minimalism In his output from the
mid-1960s onwards, he had examined the possibilities inherent in subjecting very
small amounts of musical material - often just a few notes - to extensive
repetition, in a style having some similarities to those of his compatriots and
almost exact contemporaries, who include Terry Riley and Steve Reich For a
decade Glass's concern lay, like Reich's (the two composers were friends for
some of this time), in the audibility of the musical processes – in particular
the rhythmic processes - generated by this approach From 1968, all his
compositions were written for the amplified group consisting mainly of flutes, saxophones,
electric keyboards and, later, voices that became the Philip Glass Ensemble. In
the mid-1970s, however, his interest in the structural rigours of his music
lessened, and he began to reinvest melody and harmony - elements which had been
sidelined in the obsession with minimalist processes - with a new purchase on
their potential Tunes and the sorts of chord progressions which accompanied
them in more familiar kinds of Western music could now be explored afresh in the
surviving context of minimalist repetition.
The result was a rather different kind of music from compositions
such as Music in Similar Motion of 1969, or even Glass's first stage
work, Einstein on the Beach, conceived in collaboration with the
director and designer Robert Wilson and premiered in 1976. New investigations
of melody and, especially, harmonic progression were already important
strategies enabling Glass to sustain musical and dramatic interest over the several
unbroken hours of Einstein's duration. But it was only when these had
been allied with the vocal and orchestral forces of the traditional Western
opera house - forces much more conventional than those of the composer's own
ensemble - that he was able to fulfil his new lyric and dramatic aspirations
with the resources which come as part of the natural territory of twentieth-century
opera. This new approach -partly a matter of text as well as texture (the
voices of the early Philip Glass Ensemble did not sing text, as such, only individual
syllables or numbers) - could also be tested on more rock-orientated endeavours.
What Glass's music in the last quarter of a century has lost in note-to-note rigour,
it has gained in range of expression.
While the differences between Glass's early minimalist
and later (post-?) minimalist scores are considerable - making possible not
only a greater range but also, as a consequence of this, the composer's considerable
success since the early 1980s continuities between the old Glass and the new
abound. One of these is his involvement with writing music for the
'legitimate', rather than the musical, theatre The composer's first wife, JoAnne
Akalaitis, had been much involved with a theatre group first formed during the
couple's years in Paris in 1964--6, which back in New York eventually became
known as Mabou Mines This group became particularly associated not only with
the plays but also with other writings of Samuel Beckett, of which the author
allowed Mabou Mines to make staged versions.
Company originated as instrumental music for Fred Neumann's
adaptation of Beckett's prose text of the same name, mounted in New York in
January 1983; it was thus composed around the same time as Akhnaten. Like
this opera, Glass's Company is steeped in doom-laden arpeggios in minor
keys cross-cut with driving rhythms: features shared, in fact, by all three compositions
on this disc. Beckett's Company - concerned, as so often with this
author, with memory, but unusually autobiographical - involves a solitary figure
lying on his back in the dark; the music's dark ruminations thus seem entirely
appropriate. As a concert piece, the four short movements taken from this score
can be performed either by a string quartet (it is also known as Glass's Second
String Quartet) or, as here, by a string orchestra.
Akhnaten, first performed in Stuttgart on 24th
March 1984, is the composer's third large-scale stage work; it was conceived as
the final instalment of a trilogy with Einstein and Satyagraha (1980),
the latter, based on Mahatma Gandhi' s early years in South Africa, being
Glass's first opera for the forces of the conventional Western opera house. Akhnaten's
subject is the Egyptian pharaoh of the fourteenth century BC who is held to be
the first monotheist and whose radicalism led, after seventeen turbulent years,
to his overthrow and presumed murder. The opera's three acts show the rise and
fall of Akhnaten in a series of tableaux; the libretto is sung in a mixture of
ancient languages and English.
On the present recording, the opening Prelude - with
its magnificently sustained arc of tension and not-quite release - is followed
by the dance from Act Two,
Scene 3 which, in more obviously rhythmic fashion, celebrates
the inauguration of the city of Akhetaten created by the new pharaoh; in an
actual production, musicians appear on stage along with the rest of the cast.
In both these extracts, some unsettling metrical ambiguities enhance the drama.
And throughout the opera, the predominatingly dark mood is enhanced by the
absence of violins from the orchestra (an omission actually brought about by
practical restrictions on the Stuttgart premiere performances).
The Violin Concerto is the first of many orchestral
works that Glass has composed on commission since the late 1980s, following the
acclaim accorded to Satyagraha and Akhnaten The choice of the concerto form
seemed a natural one for a composer then currently obsessed with opera he found
it 'more theatrical and more personal' than music for orchestra alone The work was
premiered by Paul Zukofsky and the American Composers Orchestra under Dennis
Russell Davies in New York on 5th April 1987. Both these musicians had worked
with Glass before. Zukofsky played the part of Albert Einstein (in Einstein
on the Beach the character is represented by a solo violinist, not a
singer) in that stage work's first performances; Davies had conducted the premiere
of Akhnaten.
The concerto's familiar three-movement, broadly fast-slow-fast,
layout was in fact accidental. Zukofsky, who collaborated closely with the
composer during the work's gestation, had requested a slow, high finale. Glass's
original plan to have five short movements changed in the course of composing the
piece, and he ended up with two movements followed by, a third one which
concludes with a slow coda making references to the material of both previous
movements, thus also complying with his soloist's wishes.
The composer's familiar repeated arpeggiations, together
with other types of figuration likewise idiomatic meat and drink to the fiddle,
sometimes predominate over the melodic impulse. Yet this choice of solo
instrument has also inspired lyrical material, intercut with and sometimes counterpointing
the arpeggiations in quite dramatic fashion in the first movement. The central
movement’s set of variations on a descending bass line, too, allows the solo
part to soar and the variations themselves to rise and fall in a simple but
moving progression, while the coda to the finale brings another quite dramatic
movement, and the work as a whole, to a rapt conclusion. The affecting minor
modes and chromatically shifting harmonies of the Violin Concerto are
entirely typical of Glass’s style at the time it was composed.
Keith Potter