Glass Notes

Night Talk Interview March 26, 2008

Anonymously submitted, in three parts.

Scott Hicks discusses "GLASS"/trailer

Glass & Steel - Koyaanisqatsiville USA (update)

A few weeks back I was on my way to Pennsylvania and soon after crossing the mighty Delaware, we took a detour to see incredible Bethlehem Pennsylvania.  So reminiscent is it of some distant decayed past, a certain era which called for another way of living, a friend remarked that the PGE should perform in one of these abandoned buildings.  Laughing, I said that I know that they once performed in an empty train station (la gare d'Orsay in Paris).  Little did I know that there was actually a strong Glass connection to this hallowed place.  This may be common knowledge to some, but I knew about Glass' day jobs as a cab driver, a plumber, artist assistant, etc. I was truly shocked to learn from a 2001 UK interview: "After college, Glass went back to Baltimore and spent six months working as a crane operator at the Bethlehem steel mills to earn money for his postgraduate studies." Photos by proud Pennsylvania native Ryan Connolly - As it turns out there is another Bethlehem Steel Mill in Sparrow Point Maryland, near Bal'more, which I'm guessing is that one at which Glass worked.

Songs and Poems on TheRestIsNoise.com

Justin Davidson, the Pulitzer-Prize winning critic, who is manning New Yorker critic's blog, www.therestisnoise.com , discusses "Songs and Poems":
For reasons I can’t quite articulate, Philip Glass tops the list of composers whose music friends and colleagues keep telling me I really ought to love but that, in fact, I don’t. (The rest of the list is confidential, and I will neither confirm nor deny that Bruckner’s name appears anywhere on it.) However, I have become smitten with one freshly blown Glass recording: Songs and Poems for solo cello, played by Wendy Sutter. Instead of the richly layered thrumming of his orchestral pieces, which often put me in mind of a showroom full of idling Jaguars, Glass has pared his patterns down so that they sound intensely personal. Glass and Sutter reportedly fell in love over this score, and it does have a romantically melancholy tone. It’s not a conversation, though, but a soliloquy, that most unsociable of forms. Sutter has a big sound, which makes her cello seem that much more solitary–a filament of expression; a lone, repeating rune. The CD includes Tissues, for cello, percussion, and piano, from 2002, which is chamber music of a particularly stark and lonely, though eerily beautiful kind. The patterns seem like stutters here: the cello keeps trying to formulate a complete thought–to connect with instruments that either keep their distance by moving along in parallel motion or shimmer in a floating harmonic halo.

Warriors for Peace NYC

Photos by David Burns

MoMA & Mishima

Thanks to Eric and Greg for calling attention to the upcoming Mishima DVD release on Criterion including an interview with Philip Glass discussing his landmark score. Reading the free Metro newspaper on my way to work today, I came upon this add for MoMA.

Close Encounter - The Met Opera

On the eve of a new exhibition of portraits of Philip Glass, Chuck Close tells Gallery Met Director Dodie Kazanjian about 40 years of creating images of his composer friend.

Radio Play - Solo Cello (UPDATED)

Again tonight on WNYC at 8:15pm, they will be playing selections from the new Philip Glass album, Songs and Poems for Solo Cello. On Tuesday they played "Songs and Poems" in its entirety, tonight one presumes the Tissues from Naqoyqatsi.
As a follow up, here is the review of the CD in the Washington Post by the prominent critic, Anne Midgette, formerly of the New York Times but now at the Post in the position formerly held by Tim Page.

"It's a sad fact that sometimes a critic fails to appreciate a piece fully the first time through. When Wendy Sutter, the cellist from the Bang on a Can All-Stars, gave the world premiere of Philip Glass's "Songs and Poems for Solo Cello" at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York a year ago, I quite liked it. Hearing it again on recording -- the piece has been released as a slender (43-minute) CD on Glass's own label, paired with "Tissues (from Naqoyqatsi)" -- I found it not merely pleasant, but gripping.
Glass has always been both prolific and uneven, turning out pieces that are sometimes excellent, sometimes apparently written on autopilot. But "Songs and Poems" maintains an unusual degree of directness and warmth. Digging into the lower registers of the instrument, it takes flight in handfuls of notes, now gentle, now impassioned, variously evoking the minor-mode keening of klezmer music and the interior meditations of Bach's cello suites. There's little mere repetition here, and when it comes, it means something: like the rocking gestures of the seventh and final song, a kind of wistful balm to soak up the intensity of what has preceded it.
Sutter's performance contributes not a little to the intensity; that this piece is deeply personal (she and Glass are a couple) comes through loud and clear in the tanglings of her bow, the throaty richness of her tone. But "Tissues," a group of pieces written for Yo-Yo Ma, while not as strong as "Songs and Poems," suggests that Glass has a natural affinity for cello. On this recording, the instrument seems to respond to his demands in a way that the human voice has never quite been able to. -- Anne Midgette

Cello Concerto Complete US Premiere

The Elfman-Glass connection

From NY Magazine: "And the score by Danny Elfman, often thumping and wildly percussive, reminds us a great deal of the pulse Philip Glass's music gave to one of Twyla's greatest works, In the Upper Room."

This was from a preview of the new Twyla Tharpe ballet as reviewed in the NY Magazine.  This is Elfman's third "concert work" as such.  In the liner notes to his first large scale "Serenada Schizophrana" , Elfman cited Philip Glass as one of his living influences.  About a year ago, Elfman presented Glass with the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing at The 18th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (above photo).  The respect seems to be mutual. I ran into PG on the subway about that time last year and we chatted about Elfman. Glass mentioned the respect he has for Elfman and how sincere and gifted he is in his art.