A passionate advocate of both historic and new music, Mark Steinbach is University Organist, Curator of Instruments, and Senior Lecturer in Music at Brown University. On Glass and Bach in Dresden, he performs on the renowned 1755 Silbermann Organ, one of the most famous organs in all of Europe, which is located at the Cathedral of St. Trinitas in Dresden Germany. The program ties together the music of two composers, Philip Glass and J. S. Bach, separated by centuries yet inextricably linked on a musical level. While it's a rare treat to hear Bach on an instrument very much of his time, it's also a special gift to hear modern music on such a prestigious instrument.
On Philip Glass - Songs, Baritone Martin Achrainer and pianist Maki Namekawa give the world premiere recording of Glass's 1997 song-cycle Songs of Milarepa, about the spiritual journey of Milarepa, a Tibetan poet who lived 900 to 1,000 years ago. Martin Achrainer has quickly become a Glass specialist of a kind, having sung in multiple Glass operas including his breakthrough performance as Kepler, the title role of Glass's 2009 grand opera. Namekawa is one of the preeminent artists working with Philip Glass today. Chose by Glass in 2014 to be the first pianist to record his Complete Piano Etudes. The album concludes with Three Songs for Baritone and Piano which is a collection of songs drawn from two sources, Glass's 1989 song opera Hydrogen Jukebox which was created with Allen Ginsberg, and two songs from Monsters of Grace, a multimedia opera created with director Robert Wilson.
A Common Time, the new recording from violinist Chase Spruill, includes the world premiere recording of Philip Glass's Sarabande in Common Time for solo violin (2016). His second full album dedicated the composer, it includes a selection of his works for solo violin and new transcriptions by Spruill. These new recordings feature the iconic music for the films Candyman and Naqoyqatsi, as well as music from Glass's stage works (A Madrigal Opera, Afternoon Waltz from The Screens) and purely instrumental music, such as Arabesque in Memoriam.
Violet Fire is a new opera from composer Jon Gibson about the imminent inventor Nikola Tesla. Jon Gibson is a distinguished composer and performer who is an original member of the Philip Glass Ensemble and has been involved in historic first performances including most of the original Philip Glass Ensemble repertoire but also major landmarks like Terry Riley's In C. Accomplished as a composer in his own right, In this new opera Violet Fire, Gibson explores the life of Nikola Tesla, the perpetually intriguing personality, inventor, and early pioneer of electrical engineering. This two CD set from Orange Mountain Music presents the complete opera including full printed libretto and photos from the live productions.
Grammy-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein's Undersong is the third of a trilogy of albums recorded since the pandemic began. On this program, Dinnerstein delves deeper into what it means to be alive during this time and the role of the artist. "All of the music on this album consists of musical forms that have a refrain. Glass, Schumann, Couperin and Satie constantly revisit the same material in these pieces, worrying at it, shifting it to different harmonies and into different rhythmic shapes. Working with this music in the fall of 2020 was a constant reminder that in my afternoon walk in Greenwood Cemetery, I was quite literally treading a familiar path every day, a path that nonetheless had changed almost imperceptibly every time I left the house. Undersong is an archaic term for a song with a refrain, and to me it also suggests a hidden text. Glass, Schumann, Couperin and Satie all seem to be attempting to find what they want to say through repetition, as though their constant change and recycling will focus the ear and the mind. This is music to get lost in."
2020 release. Guitarist Gerard Cousins's Escape features arrangements for solo guitar of Philip Glass's best known music. Appropriately, Cousins starts with a flowing account of 'Opening', the first track from Glass's iconic 1983 album Glassworks, designed to introduce the public to the composer's music. Cousins follows the mood with four tracks from Glass's piano pieces Metamorphosis, the second of which, 'Metamorphosis No.2', became the basis for the piece 'Escape!' from the Oscar-nominated score to The Hours. The album concludes with 'Knee Play 2' from Glass's 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, a landmark of 20th century theater, and finally 'Truman Sleeps' from Glass's Golden Globe-winning score to The Truman Show.
Maki Namekawa is one of Glass's closest collaborators. In 2019 Glass composed his First Piano Sonata specifically for Namekawa and her particular brand of joyful precision. A major work, the Piano Sonata is twice as long as anything the composer has previously written for the instrument. His latest published work, it was premiered at the Piano Festival Ruhr in Germany in the summer of 2019 before having it's US premiere in New York in November 2019. It embraces the exacting expertise, playfulness, and joy which Namekawa brings to all of her music making. The album is rounded out by Glass's two most recent piano works, "Distant Figure" A Passacaglia for Solo Piano and 2012's Etude No.20.
Long champions of new music, pianist Robert McDuffie and violin virtuoso Elizabeth Pridgen fix a spotlight on three masterpieces of the violin piano repertoire by three of the most celebrated American composers of the past half century: Philip Glass, John Adams and John Corigliano. On Icons, the artists extend their expertise in the music of Philip Glass with his Violin Sonata from 2008, infusing the work with an energy and charm. John Adams, hailed by the New York Times in September 2022 as "arguably our greatest living composer," wrote his seminal Road Movies for violin and piano in 1995. It quickly became a staple of the repertoire. Evoking the vast expanse of the American continent and the archetypal American road trip, the piece captures the landscape as it passes by your car windows. McDuffie and Pridgen's performance embodies the sleek rhythmic precision required to appreciate that imaginary journey. Perhaps his most famous piece, John Corigliano's Violin Sonata was written in the 1960s when the composer was in his mid 20s, and his father, the famous violinist John Corigliano Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Despite writing the sonata for his father, years would pass before he would take on the piece and only then because the sonata had organically become an unmitigated success. Since then, it has continued to be one of the best pieces written in the past 50 years for violin and piano. Joy and expertise are in abundance in these recordings, and the end result is a contextualizing of three works by these great masters. Each composer is tremendously different from one another, but united in the artistry of Robert McDuffie and Elizabeth Pridgen.
Africa Sings is a probing celebration into African music, through classical music and jazz, through legacy and tradition. The recital begins with Angelique Kidjo singing Bella Bellow's Senye, segueing into the premiere recording of Philip Glass's orchestral song-cycle Three Ife Songs, composed for Kidjo in 2014. The focus goes then to American music with Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige in Maurice Peress orchestral arrangement, before shifting to Europe and Alexander Zemlinsky's Symphonic Songs sung by Martin Achrainer which set, in translation into German, the poems of the great Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Frank Horne. Kidjo joins the venerable Bruckner Orchester Linz and conductor Dennis Russell Davies who cruise through the Ellington before digging deep into the Zemlinsky with baritone Martin Achrainer in tour-de-force performances from beginning to end.
Michael Riesman - Philip Glass Soundtracks Volume II - Orange Mountain Music presents the new album PHILIP GLASS SOUNDTRACKS VOL. II by pianist Michael Riesman. Riesman was the producer, conductor, and pianist on most every Philip Glass soundtrack including Glass's three Oscar-nominated scores to The Hours, Kundun, and Notes on a Scandal, as well as on Glass' Golden Globe-winning score to The Truman Show. On this new recital, Riesman presents a complement to his 2008 album Glass Soundtracks (Vol. I) in a chronological survey of Glass' work from arthouse films like Koyaanisqatsi, documentary features The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, to selections from never-heard-before major commercial films like Taking Lives (starring Angelina Jolie) and Secret Window (Johnny Depp) to a five movement suite from the cult horror film Candyman featuring violinist Chase Spruill. All pieces were pieces chosen by Riesman who is the music director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, and arranged for piano (or violin and piano) by Riesman for this new disc. The result is a refreshing look at treasures from some of Philip Glass's best work in the medium of film.
When Slagwerk Den Haag (The Hague Percussion) asked Anthony Fiumara to put together a concert program for Glass's 80th birthday in 2017, he was inspired by the rhythmic patterns, the long lines and the modality in Philip Glass's early music. He arranged some of Glass's works for this virtuoso percussion group, include Glass's Music in Similar Motion and Mad Rush. In the spirit of these early minimal works, Fuimara added his own works including Vitreous Body, as his percussive tribute to Philip Glass, as well as the tracks Chorale, Petals, and Remix.
In the late-1990s, Stalteri was a pioneer in interpretations and arrangements of Philip Glass's piano music. His album, Circles, became one of the early classics of the Glass piano repertoire. When approached by the label about an anniversary re-release of Circles, Stalteri responded with the idea to re-record, re-interpret, and re-imagine these Glass works. The title, Dodecagon, is drawn from the name of a shape with twelve sides - corresponding to the twelve tracks on the album.
Born out of a meeting between Philip Glass and flutist James Strauss in 2011, Venezuelan Elegy is a celebration of the artistic sprit. Despite being a flutist by training, Glass has not written extensively for 'his' instrument. Strauss always wanted to perform Glass's music, so he wrote his own arrangements of several Glass compositions. Strauss moved to Venezuela right as political troubles were coming to a head. For him, this recording was a chance showcase great musicians who found themselves in the midst of a collapsing government.
Eleonor Sandresky has worked closely with Glass as a musician for over three decades and often performs with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Piano etudes are often designed to address a technical challenge in playing the piano. In the case of Glass's etudes, many of the pieces were designed to address deficiencies in his own playing. Apart from technical challenges, Glass's music clearly expresses a certain mood and tone in stark contrast to one another. Inasmuch, Sandresky is an ideal interpreter of Glass's music. However, in this case, that was not the tie that binds. Some of these same qualities of mood and technical challenge inhabit Sandresky's etudes - yet she pursues a different more serious undertaking, seeking to capture in her music the unobtainable, the strange energies that surround and infiltrate our lives.
Dutch pianist Feico Deutekom offer a new perspective on Glass's piano Etudes, one of the landmark bodies of work in the 21st Century. The most common approach for pianists is to simple record Glass's twenty Etudes in straight order. However, Deutekom, one of the preeminent Glass specialists on the scene today, takes a much more personal approach. He performs and records the Etudes in a sequence which tells a very different story from Glass's own order. In fact, there's a historical case to be made for re-sequencing Glass's Etudes as the composer did himself when he renumbered 1-6 after the premieres. The result is a time-traveling musical adventure with a different dramatic arc from the familiar sequence.
Orange Mountain Music is proud to present the premiere recording of Philip Glass's original score to the 2019 Broadway production of King Lear, which starred Glenda Jackson as Lear and Ruth Wilson as Cordelia/The Fool. For this new production, directed by Sam Gold and produced by Scott Rudin, Glass composed almost an hour of new music for string quartet. Complementing the quartet are three songs that Glass composed to the Shakespeare text featuring Ruth Wilson singing as part of a role that earned her a Tony nomination. Glass's quartet features violinists Natalie Cummins and Martin Agee, with Christopher Cardona on viola and Stephanie Cummins on cello. After over 100 Broadway performances, it was played in the recording studio with an absolute mastery that would not be possible for a concert piece. The recording was produced by Glass's long-time music director Michael Riesman.
