by Ryan Ross
In one of his film reviews, Roger Ebert commented that he judges a movie by what it’s trying to do and how well he thinks it does it. I don’t review every classical music release this way, because I place unequal value on the different things composers and performers try to do. But when tasked with reviewing the music of Philip Glass, I’m faced with special challenges that remind me of Ebert’s quip. The central problem is this: I’m a firm believer in postminimalism, and especially Glass’s brand of it; but I’m awkwardly aware that the standards by which I come down on others’ music don’t apply here. For example, see my February 11th Avril Coleridge-Taylor review. Glass flouts those standards more completely than she does. The difference is that he does so on purpose. I used to sneer at this purpose, much like the haughty critics who still do. But I no longer hate what he does. Indeed, I’m quite won over. If that makes me kind of a hypocrite, so be it.
In minimalism’s early days the emphasis was on subtle changes over extended repetitive structures. Something of that pattern carries over to postminimalism of the 1980s and beyond, but with more commercial appeal and less biting experimentalism. Repetition and commercial appeal aren’t the ingredients formalist critics tend to espouse. But I think we’ve had enough biting experimentalism in classical music during the past century to last us five more. And by now composers have integrated and ‘organicized’ everything under the sun, to cheering generations of pedants who should have been mathematicians instead of music pundits. Can we ever take a break from all of that? My focus is instead on distinctiveness and communicative power. When it comes to those, Glass has much going for him. He composes with the pragmatism of a man who once installed appliances to make ends meet, and who understands the importance of a good paycheck.
If you’re like the people I’ve just spent two paragraphs scolding, you’ll hate this new disc. It is difficult to think of two works by Glass that more epitomize his style since the 1980s. The score for The Hours is perhaps his best-known film music, deftly coloring the picture’s themes of alienation and tragedy. Here it’s arranged by Michael Riesman for piano, strings, harp, and celesta. In this guise it loses no expressive strength; indeed, it almost seems like an extension of the original that Glass himself might have scored, so often does his postminimalism leverage timbre for its most powerful effects. Nor does one necessarily need to have viewed the film for a meaningful listening experience. Maybe that’s true in order to get the most out of it. But “most” isn’t everything, and that’s what film music scoffers repeatedly fail to understand. When I listen to The Hours score I hear an “end of history” type of world-weariness that surfaces in much of Glass’s music, and that quite transcends the movie itself. He does this better than almost every other living composer I know. Many of us living through the West's turbulent recent decades have confronted the kinds of existential questions this music evokes. We Glass fans hear a singular mixture of reflection, hope, gloom, tragedy, spirituality, and more, where his detractors only hear interminable arpeggios. It’s a unique but highly communicative voice, something that has eluded the likes of Riley, Reich, and even Adams.
That same voice animates the second selection. This is not the first recording of the Tirol Concerto (Piano Concerto No. 1), but to my ears it’s the best. The Baroklyn strings’ decision to focus “on the larger beats” and wanting “every voice to have its own ebb and flow, coinciding with other voices in certain larger pulse divisions” (liner notes) pays off for the listener. Compare their sound to the competition — it works to this music’s decided advantage. The feel of large-scale pulsation with each repetition and thematic iteration is crucial to the work’s experience. Rather than feeling exhausted, the sympathetic listener comes through properly appreciating one of Glass’s grandest slow movements. The outer sections of this postmodern masterpiece appreciatively hop and sparkle here, helped by wonderful tunes all the way through. A healthy momentum here keeps the music from getting bogged down. The latter must be avoided at all costs — it’s minimalism’s most tender vulnerability.
The title Hourglass is a clever bit of wordplay — Glass becomes hourglass, with a nod toward both The Hours and a nearly 60-minute run time along the way. But it also speaks to ensemble director Simone Dinnerstein's perceptive remarks in her liner notes. "When I think about the music of Philip Glass," she writes, "I think about time. The music is intricate and polyphonic. It's layered, with patterns that keep shifting in the subtlest of ways." It's "multi-linear." Quite so. If you listen carefully, there is definitely more here than initially meets the ear. But I still think that what animates everything is Glass's extraordinary melodic gift. I keep telling people that the history of Western music bears this out with few exceptions: the most successful stuff has good melody. Maybe it doesn't only have that, and maybe good melody isn't the most intellectually compelling component. Yet, this nearly consistent truth relates back to the notion that music must reach the heart and not just the head. So yes, the themes of time, cycles, waves, and pulses all contribute to splendid music and performances here. But all of it would amount to little without an X factor that resists analysis — and that's exactly from where Glass's memorable themes come.
