Bruce Levington has a long association with composer Philip Glass. In 2004, the composer wrote his musical tribute to Chuck Close expressly for Levingston who later premiered the piece at Lincoln Center in New York City.” The next year, Levingston and Glass joined again in the same venue for a concert of piano duets which also featured Levingston’s longtime friend, Ethan Hawke. This group of artists has joined together once more for this release of Glass’s works. Levinston is an internationally recognized concert pianist and recording artist, whose last album, “Heavy Sleep,” garnered the praise of audiences and critics, being named one of New York Times’ “Best Recordings of the Year.” This release includes the world premiere recording of “The Illusionist Suite,” as well as ten of the composer’s deeply moving Etudes. This two disc set has already been praised by media outlets. The New York Times recognizes “Mr. Levingston’s mastery of nuance and color,” and MusicWeb International praised his “extraordinary gifts as a colorist and performer who can hold attention rapt with the softest playing.”

"After releasing my album Portrait: Philip Glass in 2008, I wanted to take a deeper dive into the vast œuvre of this composer, an icon of our era and one whose work has and will long continue to have impact. For many years now his fascinating and captivating music has been nourishing me intellectually and musically. Glass being one of the most prolific of composers, there was no shortage of works to include on this my 48th album. My selection approach remains the same; I choose those works I find significant and compelling. Like Glass’ work as a whole, the content of this album is very diverse: music for theatre and for cinema, for chamber and for symphony orchestra, and recent works as well as some written almost 50 years ago! Thank you for giving me carte blanche to revisit these works with my ensemble." (Angèle Dubeau)

Two Brazilian artists pay tribute to Villa-Lobos and the Amazon rainforest…Sebastião Salgado is a world-renowned photographer who has been working since the 1990s to protect and restore the Atlantic forest and water resources of the Rio Doce valley in Brazil. The Italian-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes is passionate about the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and his symphonic poem Floresta do Amazonas; for which she created a suite for large orchestra and soprano. Together they travel the world to present an exhibition of Salgado's photographs; combined with concerts conducted by Simone in which the photographs are projected; the photographer having associated each musical phrase with one of his images…The music of this monumental project has been recorded with the Philharmonia Zürich and soprano Camila Provenzale. Ten photos by Salgado; each more striking than the last; are included in the booklet that accompanies this recording; which is completed by another tribute to Amazonian nature; by Philip Glass; with an extract from his Aguas da Amazonia.

A theme that violinist Sara Övinge aimed to pursue in the project was the juxtaposition of the electronic and the organic. Philip Glass’s 2nd Piano Concerto is arranged for synthesizer and strings, a kind of updated version of Vivaldi’s string orchestra with continuo. But where previous recordings have gone for an electronic sound resembling the baroque harpsichord, Sara wanted to create a more electro-acoustic soundscape.

Chicago has long been a welcoming home to the working composer, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the heart of the musical life they found in the city. The three American composers whose music is performed on this recording all have important ties to the CSO, from Philip Glass’ formative years as a student listener in Orchestra Hall in the 1950s, to Jessie Montgomery, who is the Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence today, and Max Raimi, who is both a prolific composer and a longtime member of the Orchestra’s viola section. 

The works by Montgomery and Raimi were both their first CSO commissions, and these are their world premiere performances. Montgomery’s Hymn for Everyone is a meditation for orchestra that speaks to the significance of her emergence in today’s cultural climate through its reflection on the personal and collective challenges of the spring of 2021. In it, a hymn-like melody traverses different orchestral choirs to poignant effect. For each poem in Raimi’s Three Lisel Mueller Settings, he selects an admired colleague to enter into a dialogue with the soloist, mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong. This highlights the talents of Principal Clarinet Stephen Williamson in a frenetic waltz, Principal Bassoon Keith Buncke in a tragic elegy and Principal Bass Alexander Hanna in a metaphor for hope, with soaring, song-like phrases that transcend standard conceptions of the instrument’s expressive possibilities.

Glass’ Eleventh Symphony is part of the symphonic tradition that captivated him as a student. Each movement has its own unique character — the first bold and driving, the second crowned by a slowly unfolding melody and the third a barrage of cascading energy and racing percussion.

For Glass in the 50s, it was Fritz Reiner. Now Riccardo Muti champions the compositional voices of the age with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “It takes courage,” says Glass of the Orchestra’s legacy of performing contemporary music, “and that courage becomes a tradition.”

REVIEWS:

This album stands as testimony to the Italian master’s innate musical understanding and ability to bring out the best in almost everything he conducts.

-- Gramophone

Glass delivers a variant of the crowd-pleasing movie music he has trademarked for decades. It is hard to gainsay America’s most prolific and popular serious composer. Muti’s performance is all that it could be, and the orchestra lends glamour to the score.

-- Fanfare

When composer Philip Glass started work on his solo Piano Etudes back in 1991, his goal was “to explore a variety of tempi, textures, and piano techniques,” but also, as he mentioned in a 2012 interview, to become “a better player.” Ever since, the Etudes have occupied a place of unrivaled prominence in modern music as a proving ground for up-and-coming, and established, classical pianists to test their mettle. It seems only fitting, then, that Vicky Chow should take up the challenge. For more than a decade, she has exerted her star presence with her standout work as part of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, while also teaming up with such composers as Michael Gordon, Tristan Perich, Jane Antonia Cornish and more to release a series of compelling, and at times even physically demanding, solo performances. She has also shared stages with Glass himself — experiences that have given her a more immediate and personal grasp of the composer's original intention.

Craig Morris, former principal trumpet player of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has recorded brilliant solo trumpet versions of three Philip Glass classics. Morris’s new recording features works ranging from Glass’s constantly shifting ‘Melodies’ (1995) to the driving minimalist rhythms and figures of ‘Gradus’ (1968) and ‘Piece in the Shape of a Square’ (1967). ‘Melodies’ was written as incidental music for a play based on the novel, Un Captif Amoureux (Prisoner of Love) by the French author Jean Genet. Glass’s thirteen melodies cover a wide range of emotion, from touching and introspective to joyous and dancing. The visual element of ‘Piece in the Shape of a Square,’ is much more a part of the composition than it is in ‘Gradus.’ The music is set up in a roughly 10’ square, with one performer on the inside of the square and one performer on the outside. The performer on the inside moves around the square in a clockwise direction, while the performer on the outside moves around in a counterclockwise direction. Virtuoso trumpeter Craig Morris plays both parts on this fascinating recording.

Also available on Blu-ray

The last days of the American icon Walt Disney form a powerful and poignant subject for Philip Glass's latest opera, which was filmed at its first performances in Madrid in January 2013. Phelim McDermott's spectacular production is worthy of Disney's own visual imagination and its definitive influence on American culture, while in the pit is the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, an experienced and authoritative champion of the composer's hypnotically beautiful music, which gives wings to Rudy Wurlitzer's operatic transformation of Peter Stephan Jungk's novel, using both fact and fiction to peer into Disney's troubled psyche as illness forces him to confront his mortality.

What the press said: ''...one of the crowning events of the past year's globe-trotting celebration of Mr. Glass's 75th birthday.'' The New York Times
Philip Glass
THE PERFECT AMERICAN

Walt Disney – Christopher Purves
Roy – David Pittsinger
Dantine – Donald Kaasch
Hazel George – Janis Kelly
Lillian Disney – Marie McLaughlin
Sharon – Sarah Tynan
Diane – Nazan Fikret
Lucy / Josh – Rosie Lomas

The Improbable Skills Ensemble
Madrid Teatro Real Chorus and Orchestra
Dennis Russell Davies, conductor

Phelim McDermott, stage director

Recorded live from the Teatro Real, Madrid, February 2013

Bonus:
- Cast gallery

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: LPCM 2.0 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean
Running time: 120 mins
No. of DVD: 1

This program reverses time, revealing the Metamorphosis in Glass’s work from his 1980s film and theatre transcriptions, through The Olympian composed for the Los Angeles Olympiad, to rarities such as the dream-like Coda. The Trilogy Sonata highlights Glass’s renowned operas from the celebratory Akhnaten Dance to the stately Satyagraha and landmark Einstein on the Beach. The dazzling pulse-patterns of Two Pages make it a milestone of minimalism, while the Sonatina No. 2 is a pre-minimalist work composed when Glass was a student of Darius Milhaud at Juilliard.

-----

Review:

Nicolas Horvath's own liner notes to this recording reveal his inclination toward analytical detail. He extracts thematic material from the rotating structures that Glass sets spinning like so many Buddhist prayer wheels. In doing so he compels the listener to experience the music more melodically than its hypnotic patterns might otherwise allow. Presenting this repertoire in such a deeply engaging and listenable way makes Horvath a compelling interpreter.

– The Whole Hote

Classical Music

After its rediscovery in the second half of the 20th century, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has become so popular that it has become a model of inspiration for similar collections that have the same subject matter, use similar instrumental forces and, often, are commissioned to be played alongside the original. Issued in conjunction with the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Astor Piazzolla (4 July 1992), Sixteen Seasons brings together on album for the first time the four most famous Four Seasons: hence alongside Vivaldi’s Italian concertos, also the Argentinian Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas of Piazzolla (in the version by Leonid Desyatnikov, a composer of Ukrainian origin), The American Four Seasons of Philip Glass, and the “Vivaldi recompositions” of British Max Richter. To guide us through these seasons – which are spread over different continents, climates and musical styles – is Concerto Mediterraneo, an ensemble made up of musicians from all over Italy and directed by Gianna Fratta, while the eclectic Alessandro Quarta shares the solo violin role with Dino De Palma. The liner notes by historian Alessandro Vanoli and meteorologist Luca Mercalli complete a project that also stands as a reflection on the profound relationship between man and the alternation of the seasons and the role played by climate change from Vivaldi’s day to the present.

Akhnaten, Philip Glass's third opera, is a work of relatively compact dimensions but with all the qualities of epic about it. More a history than a story, it tells in Glass's characteristically elliptical fashion of the rise and fall of Akhnaten, sun-worshipper and monotheist, the 'man of religion' who complements in Glass's opera-trilogy the 'man of science' in Einstein on the Beach, and Gandhi, 'man of politics' in Satyagraha. Instead of a libretto there are texts and documents recovered by the Egyptologists, sung or spoken against an endlessly flowing line of orchestral background that symbolizes the passage of time.

Characters as such barely exist, indeed the very notion of 'characterization' is quite inapplicable to the elusive figures who pass through the music like ghosts or shadows. Religious fervour always excepted, everything is drained of human detail and emotion. Even the Act 2 duet between Akhnaten and Nefertiti has all the passion of a pair of scarab beetles mating, indeed, it comes as no surprise to find that the words of this domestic exchange are the same ones used just minutes earlier to address the sun-god Aten. Such is the manner of this solemn, ritualistic work. Decades pass; religions are set up and topple; always the orchestra, the ultimate protagonist, throbs underneath with its almost seamless weft of minor-mode arpeggios. Like Satie's Socrate, another piece of 'white music' and a score to which Akhnaten owes a great deal, this is a statuesque work of such earnestness that the term 'opera', with its implication of drama, fails to communicate the nature of the conception.

Akhnaten contains some of Glass's very best music. The Act I funeral scene, almost anthropo-logically observed with its terrifying drumming and the wild trumpet that accompanies the male chorus at the climax of the procession, strikes a chilling note from which the atmosphere never recovers. The final scene, sung wordlessly by the ghosts of Akhnaten, his wife and his mother in the ruins of their city, haunts the mind long after the music has ceased to play. Strangest and most wonderful of all is the ''Hymn to the Sun'', sung by Akhnaten himself at the centre of the opera, and addressed to the audience in its own language—English was chosen for the recording. It is one of the very few moments when we are invited to participate in Akhnaten's private world of belief, and with Glass's mesmeric music it's difficult not to be drawn in completely and utterly.

Success in the performance of Akhnaten relies more upon the orchestra than on voices, and here the Stuttgart State Opera (which commissioned the work) does a superb job. With relatively limited scope for interpretation, the soloists are to be judged more for the nature of their voices than for what they put into the playing of their parts, and in this regard I was slightly disappointed only by Paul Esswood, whose tense, tight-toned singing of the title-role turns Akhnaten into a colder, more remote figure than he need have been. The chorus is marvellous. Documentation, vital for an understanding of the story, is more than adequate, with full texts and translations from the Egyptian and Hebrew.

-- Gramophone, 02/1998

As I said in a review of another Philip Glass recording “you know in advance what you are going to get with Philip Glass”. Even more so in the case of this recording, where some of the works - The Hours, Mishima and Company - are already quite known.

The French-Canadian string ensemble La Pietà - all female, in case you hadn’t guessed - and their leader Angèle Dubeau present what is essentially a sampler of the accessible, more recent Glass. Does that mean it will only appeal for someone wishing to hesitantly dip their toe into the Glass pool and be of no interest to the Glass aficionado? Definitely not - the works are all complete as long as you count overtures and opening credits as individual pieces. Some lesser known pieces are included and the performances and acoustics are excellent.

The overture for the “multimedia opera project” La Belle et al Bête (Beauty and the Beast) for piano and strings is the most dramatic and up-tempo music on the disc and gets proceedings off to a fine start. You can see the whole piece performed by Dubeau and La Pietà on Youtube.

I regard the score for The Hours as one of the finest ever written, and this concerto-style arrangement by long-time Glass collaborator Michael Reisman allows a greater continuity than the original itself allows.

I hadn’t heard The Secret Agent film-score before, and based on this haunting cello-dominated extract, I went searching for the complete music, which is available on Nonesuch and I am ordering it as I write. Echorus was written for Yehudi Meuhin and the sleeve-notes describe it as akin to a Baroque chaconne, and quotes Philip Glass “it is meant to evoke feelings of serenity and peace”, which it certainly achieves.

Mishima and Company are respectively string quartets 3 and 2, presented here in their string orchestra versions. The former is more sombre, the latter dominated by the archetypal Glass motoric rhythms and the final eponymously titled movement of Mishima is quite beautiful. The disc ends as it began with piano joining the strings for the elegiac Closing, from Glassworks, and one of the first compositions intended to broaden the audience for Glass’s music.

Detractors will say that there is little variation in atmosphere through the fifteen tracks on the disc, and that is true. However, as I said at the start, you already know that with this composer. In fact, the very constancy of the music’s mood makes this a recording that works at two different levels. Listen to it intently and you are rewarded by glorious melodies and the subtle variations that are his stock-in-trade, or have it playing in the background and soothe your troubled soul.

Suffice to say in conclusion that this is one of the best CDs I have bought this year.

-- David J Barker, MusicWeb International 

One of Philip Glass’ most glorious themes, this release focuses on the subject of love. From his BAFTA award-winning music for The Hours to his iconic Music In Fifths, the genius of this composer is felt throughout the duration of this album. The Hours is featured here in its entirety, complete with three previously unpublished movements. The release also includes the breathtaking Modern Love Waltz and the world premiere recording of Notes On A Scandal. Performing these works is Nicolas Horvath.

REVIEW:

Set to a rich orchestral score, JANE the film offers an unprecedented, intimate portrait of Jane Goodall — a trailblazer who defied the odds to become one of the world’s most admired conservationists.

“Serengeti,” one of the score's most joyful cues, is a celebration of optimism, the piano rolls and the flute and horn section carrying it even higher. It’s a spectacular piece that shows the endless imagination of the composer.

– Soundtrack Dreams