In 1994, Philip Glass wrote six seemingly common piano etudes for conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies on the celebration of his 50th birthday. Glass also wrote them for himself. Etudes are typically experiments in approach, and listed here they’re an at any time-pragmatic composer’s routines to strengthen his own actively playing.
Davies gave the premiere in Bonn, Germany, in 1994 and before long after performed them at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. They appeared then like both technological scientific studies and compositional ones, concentrating on this melodic mobile or that propulsive rhythmic concept, intended to get the fingers going and the compositional juices flowing, but not considerably far more than that.
With Glass, even so, you hardly ever know wherever just about anything will wind up. He may possibly start out in overly acquainted territory, then by hardly perceptible gradual changes the conclude point gets an surprising marvel. That the grain of the marvel was normally there is sensed only in retrospect.
Anything identical occurred with the composition of the etudes themselves. About a span of two a long time, Glass wrote two guides of 10 each and every, starting to be at any time more richly lavish and virtuosic outside of the composer’s personal piano capabilities. The solemn and beautiful 20th is a Glass masterpiece that abstractly mirrors the music to Godfrey Reggio’s 2013 movie “Visitors,” a sequence of compact portraits that, with the enable of Glass’ rating, turns into a kind of cinematic transmigration of their souls.
The comprehensive 20 etudes are now essential Glass, his most performed new music. There have been at minimum a dozen finish recordings, the newest by the eloquent Polish pianist Maciej Ganski, produced March 25. They have come to be encore favorites by famous pianists. Yuja Wang turns No. 6 into a beautiful showpiece. Choreographers as well as pianists (experienced and newbie alike) cannot get adequate of them.
A lovingly produced big box, with sheet tunes of every etude and a ebook of eclectic essays about the etudes, came out late past year. Between these who pay back the etudes tribute in it are chef Alice Waters, painter Jenny Saville, choreographers Justin Peck and Lucinda Childs, film director Martin Scorsese, functionality artist Laurie Anderson, author Pico Iyer and NPR newscaster Ari Shapiro.
The 20 etudes have also been element of a touring in a generation by Pomegranate Arts about the previous ten years. The cycle finally attained L.A. final thirty day period offered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as a Green Umbrella live performance.
It was a revelation, but not so much for what it told us about the etudes, despite the fact that there was that, but about what Glass has wrought on audio in common. Acceptance of the 87-yr-previous composer by the classical audio establishment has been painfully gradual and weirdly irregular. On same working day of the etudes event at Walt Disney Live performance Corridor, the New York Philharmonic announced that its 2024-25 period involves Gustavo Dudamel conducting Glass’ Symphony No. 11. Shockingly, it will be the first time the orchestra will engage in a Glass symphony (he’s up to 14) and only its 2nd time doing a live performance function by New York’s most renowned composer due to the fact Leonard Bernstein.
Around the 10 days following the etudes at Disney, at live performance soon after concert in the hall and all over town, on worldwide radio and on recording, there was proof that — whether you adore him, dislike him, pay back him or his audio no intellect, or fake he doesn’t issue — you are not able to escape Philip Glass. His impact on composers of succeeding generations, irrespective of whether they acknowledge him or oppose him, is indelible.
The weekend of live shows by the San Francisco Symphony, L.A. Phil and Colburn Orchestra at Disney adhering to the etudes featured three central post-Glass generations of composers and performers — John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Timo Andres — all of whom have been afflicted just one way or one more by Glass. Their audio may well not audio nearly anything like Glass (in Salonen’s scenario adamantly not), but none of it would have been the identical with out Glass’ precedent.
In this Adams is a central determine. As the longtime L.A. Phil resourceful chair, he packages the Inexperienced Umbrella sequence, and it was important that Glass preludes preceded a weekend devoted to Adams and his affect at Disney. A lot of Glass’ have impact on American classical music has been channeled by Adams. It was he who located a way to apply the hardcore outsider minimalist musical revolution of Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley to a additional inclusive and primary musical language. With startling originality, Adams mixed the propulsive electricity of Glass to his a lot more mainstream musical enthusiasms, be they Sibelius symphonies, late Beethoven string quartets, Stravinsky, American jazz and a great deal else.
At Disney, Salonen, touring with his San Francisco Symphony, led an arresting effectiveness of Adams’ “Naïve and Sentimental Tunes,” a grand symphony in all but identify, of which Salonen had provided the world premiere with the L.A. Phil in 1999. No Glass is audible in this extensive sonic landscape, but its propulsion has minimalist roots and in the exquisite quiet heart of its slow movement there is a sort of Glassian sentience. The reception on this occasion was virtually like a rock live performance from a cheering, screaming viewers. The gamers, much too, applauded Salonen and stamped their feet, exhibiting guidance for their songs director, who has introduced that he will not renew his contract as tunes director because of the absence of support from the orchestra’s board.
Not only had Glass aided to pave the way for Adams, but it was Adams who helped pave the way for Salonen as a composer. As far as I know, the only time Salonen has ever performed Glass was dressed in a bunny go well with in a instant of silliness at the 1999 Ojai Music Competition. He and composer Magnus Lindberg commenced an opera-themed Saturday morning children’s concert seated at a piano as bunnies, banging out the opening of “Einstein on the Seaside.” That night, Salonen performed Adams’ Chamber Symphony, in which Glass and few other composers irreverently fulfill Schoenberg.
It was Adams and significantly the Chamber Symphony that experienced led to Salonen’s very own compositional breakthrough with “LA Variations” two years earlier, not so significantly as a style (no Glass, for positive) but as authorization to permit new uses of melody and harmony in his tunes.
Adams was just back again in town right after the London premiere of his newest wild and wildly partaking symphonic score, “Frenzy,” performed by Simon Rattle with the London Symphony. (An L.A. Phil co-commision, it is supposed to get there below in the 2025-26 period but can be heard by April 24 in an archived broadcast on BBC Radio 3.) At Adams’ live performance conducting the L.A. Phil very last month, he turned to however one more of his huge symphonic will work, “City Noir,” this a single commissioned for Dudamel in 2009. In a effectiveness both equally moody and propulsive, Adams relished his echoes of jazz and basic soundtracks from 1950 Hollywood noir soundtracks.
Conductor John Adams and pianist Aaron Diehl accomplish the planet premiere of Timo Andres’ “Made of Tunes,” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Live performance Corridor on March 24
(Ringo Chiu / For The Occasions)
He also done a premiere by his young colleague, Timo Andres, who is a wonderful pianist and transpired to be a single of the five individuals in the etudes concert. “Made of Tunes,” though, is a concerto for Aaron Diehl, a pianist similarly conversant in classical songs and jazz, and anyone with his very own attachment to Glass: He manufactured a glowing jazz trio arrangement of No. 16. The “tunes” Andres can make use of in his concerto appear from American folks tunes, parlor music, blues and ragtime, and they go by means of colorful repetitive transformations, embellished by Diehl’s improvisations. While sounding minimal of Glass or Adams, the way Andres develops his tunes as process, his arresting use of percussion and the music’s forward movement all indicate that he has absorbed Glass and Adams into his personal unique voice.
That originality was very considerably on screen in the etudes marathon alone. Along with Andres’ brilliantly illuminating performances, Maki Namekawa, who has been muse to Glass, brought her radiance to all she touched, particularly No. 20. Jenny Lin produced guaranteed we listened to the etudes as brilliantly virtuosic new new music. Russian pianist Anton Batagov manufactured absolutely sure we read them as brilliantly hypnotizing common tunes. Crossover pianist Lara Downes could have you believe that the etudes had been written in 2024.
In the ebook of shorter essays about the etudes, Davies, who has executed approximately all of Glass’ operas and symphonies and who is married to Namekawa, contends that the challenge of the etudes is to maintain them pure, “in the sense of preserving the moi out of it.” When his wife was studying them, he writes, he had to go outside to go away her by itself.
He has a position. Letting the processes in Glass’ songs discuss for by themselves is what offers license for other folks, which includes Glass dissenters this kind of as Salonen, to come across their very own procedures. But when it arrives to deciphering the etudes, which Davies fears could be overly romanticized in the wrong hands, he’s likely to need to have to spend a large amount of time outdoors.
The week pursuing the Disney cycle, the second and fifth etudes obtained a entire makeover in UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance’s “Maya Beiser X Philip Glass in Concert” at the Nimoy. The cellist, joined by 4 cello colleagues, slowed the etudes down to just about 50 % pace, wrapping and enrapturing her environment with the sonic blanket of amplified cellos. These transcriptions ended up no lengthier piano etudes, for every se, but the performances conveyed the essence of working towards, of understanding a piece by bit by bit likely over and around passages, finding more and more inside the audio of your instrument. you and your instrument fuse.
The resonance of Glass’ openness in the etudes is, in truth, inescapable. Laurie Anderson and the composer Jlin each create of Glass creating a perception of the infinite. Closer at hand, Third Coastline Percussion features Glass and Jlin in its concert at the Nimoy on Friday. Works by Anderson and Jlin will be element of the the Kronos Quartet’s program at Royce Corridor on April 28.
