Review: Philip Glass Ensemble at The Glasshouse
Review: Philip Glass Ensemble at The Glasshouse
Huw Lewis reports back from a rare North East date with a group who changed the musical landscape.
The appearance of the Philip Glass Ensemble on the banks of the Tyne felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
This was, after all, the group which defined minimalism as a musical force in the 1970s, with several of its original members still going strong.
Their programme, too, was eye-catching, the first half of the concert being a complete performance of Glassworks, the breakthrough composition which took minimalism from artsy venues in Manhattan to the world.
Glassworks is, like Spem in Alium, or the Goldberg Variations, or the Ninth Symphony, such a familiar milestone in the journey of music it came as a shock to hear it live for the first time, after 1,000 repeat plays at home.
Up close and personal in Gateshead, this performance of Glassworks had a human and fragile dimension not least from understanding just how demanding the music must be to play, however serene pianist and leader Michael Riesman made the opening feel.
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The ensemble’s arrangement, with what would normally be instrumental lines transposed and performed by vocalist Lisa Bielawa, brought moving new perspective to the sharp repeated patterns of the second movement Island and the fourth, Rubric, in particular.
The second half of the concert included extracts from three Glass stage works, among which the funeral music from Akhnaten was the least successful, as it suffered from being paired down to the smaller forces of the ensemble and so lost it savage imperial power.
The energy returned with the 20-minute extract from The Photographer which concluded the formal programme, and there was a final surprise for Glass junkies.
The Ensemble ended with an encore: Spaceship sequence from the rarely-performed 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, with Lisa Bielawa again performing vocal magic over swirling woodwind and synthesisers. Once in a lifetime, indeed.