DiscoGlassy

Philip Glass

Violin Concerto · Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten · Company

2000

© GlassPages, 2000

Cover Picture

References

• Naxos 8.554568.
• Naxos USA 8.559056 (Naxos American Classics).

Credits

• Original music composed by Philip Glass.
• Performers:
  • Adele Anthony, Violin.
  • Ulster Orchestra.
  • Takuo Yuasa, Conductor.
• Producer and Engineer: Tim Handley.
• Recorded at Ulster Hall, Belfast, Northern Ireland from 19th to 21st May, 1999.
• Cover Painting: Cendres Bleues 1987 by Tim Smith.
• Publisher: Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc. NY.
• © 2000 HNH International Ltd.

Tracks

Company (9:00)

1. I (2:33).
2. II (1:56).
3. III (1:50).
4. IV (2:41).

Violin Concerto (24:51)

5. I (6:51).
6. II (8:32).
7. III (9:28).

Akhnaten (17:50)

8. Prelude (12:16).
9. Dance (Act II Scene III) (5:34).

Total Time 51:41.

Notes

• 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 premièred 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 texts 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 première 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 premièred 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 première 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

• Adele Anthony

Winner of the First Prize in the 1996 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition in Denmark, Adele Anthony made her earlier debut in 1983 with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and subsequently appeared as a soloist with all six symphony orchestras of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and with orchestras in New Zealand. Her career has also brought performances with leading orchestras and collaboration with distinguished conductors throughout Europe. Adele Anthony began violin lessons at the age of two in Tasmania and studied with Beryl Kimber as an Elder Conservatorium Scholar at the University of Adelaide until 1987. She later worked with Dorothy DeLay, Felix Galimir and Hyo Kang at the Juilliard School in New York, where she held a number of scholarships and awards. A series of competition triumphs include early victory in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Instrumental and Vocal Competition and in the 1992 Aspen Walton Competition, and prizes in the 1993 Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris and the 1994 Hanover International Violin Competition. Her recordings include a 1998 release of music by Schubert for Naxos, in addition to recordings for other labels. Adele Anthony plays a 1735 Guarneri del Gesù violin on extended loan to her from Clement Arrison, through The Stradivari Society in Chicago.

• Ulster Orchestra

Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Ulster Orchestra was formed in 1966 and has established itself as one of the major symphony orchestras in the United Kingdom. The orchestra's varied activities include participation in the Belfast Festival at Queen's and the Belfast Proms, accompaniment to Opera Northern Ireland, educational work and concerts throughout Northern Ireland. The internationally acclaimed Dmitry Sitkovetsky is the orchestra's Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor, while Takuo Yuasa is Principal Guest Conductor. The orchestra records and broadcasts extensively for the BBC and has acquired a high profile through its frequent television appearances. In January 1997 the orchestra gave the first public performance at Belfast's new major performance venue, the Waterfront Hall. This concert preceded the broadcast on network television of the orchestra's performance at the official opening concert together with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, in the presence of HRH the Prince of Wales. The Ulster Orchestra has made over fifty commercial recordings, several of which have received prestigious British awards. Successful tours of Europe, Asia and America have added to the growing international reputation of the orchestra, as have its regular appearances at the BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts.

• Takuo Yuasa

The highly regarded Japanese conductor Takuo Yuasa has held positions as Principal Conductor of the Gumma Symphony Orchestra in Japan, Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and his current position as Principal Guest Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast has been extended until 2002. He conducts extensively throughout the Far East, Australia and Europe. Takuo Yuasa was born in Osaka where he studied piano, cello, flute and clarinet from an early age. At eighteen he left Japan to study in the USA at the University of Cincinnati where he completed a Bachelor Degree in Theory and Composition. He later moved to Europe to study conducting with Igor Markevitch, with Hans Swarowsky at the Hochschule in Vienna and with Franco Ferrara in Siena. Later he became assistant to Lovro von Matacic, working with him in Monte Carlo, Milan and Vienna.

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