(already subscribe? log in).

Celebrating the greatness of Philip Glass

Music Review

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 02, 2012|By Matthew Guerrieri

Composer Philip Glasss 75th birthday was honored at Carnegie Hall Tuesday.…

NEW YORK - For the 75th birthday of a New York musical icon, Philip Glass, the city arranged a sellout Carnegie Hall crowd and the US premiere of his Symphony No. 9. The work was performed by the American Composers Orchestra under the direction of frequent advocate Dennis Russell Davies, and on the composer’s exact birthday.

The celebration was a signal of both Glass’s achievement and his fame. His music is oeuvre and brand, evolving through his long career in all directions - operatic, symphonic, monumental, lyrical - yet all immediately recognizable as his.

Glass has, indeed, come a long way from minimalism, though there’s one mechanism that still threads its way through his music: One group of instruments will set up a fast-moving pattern - oscillations or arpeggios - then another group projects an accented chorale onto that screen, pealing in syncopated regularity.

In some way, everything Glass writes can be traced back to this maneuver, even as the variations on it have multiplied, and the material itself has extended far across the harmonic spectrum, all the way from clean triads to tangled, dissonant haze. The basic recipe has not changed, but he has far more ingredients to choose from.

The Symphony No. 9 opens with a basic, three-part structure, filled with juxtaposed blocks of texture, but in ever faster-cutting succession. And the blocks are multifarious: an uneasy minor-diminished seesaw here, Gothic-mood scales there, passages both monumental and moody. The percussion section keeps dropping in ever more dry and sardonic accompaniment - castanets, woodblocks - in a way reminiscent of late Shostakovich.

The second movement brings a theme as sumptuous as anything Glass has ever written, almost a pop progression, shot through with Sibelius-like grandeur. It promptly becomes grist for Glass’s motoric mill, but the machine ventures far afield, eventually reaching something like symphonic rock: the full orchestra chugging away to a percussion backbeat. The repetition here becomes a tool, a way to wind that energy back down to a resigned cafard with stylistic consistency.

The finale has something of that melancholy, too, though encased in thick, stony activity. Again, Sibelius and Shostakovich are not bad comparisons. Out of the locomotive energy of his early music, Glass has emerged as a full-blown and, in many ways, unabashedly traditional symphonist. (Davies actually stopped scattered applause that threatened the quiet endings of both the second and third movements.)