With Figures of Glass (Piano Etudes – Edits), Vanessa Wagner offers a renewed listening perspective on Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes, shaping a curated selection of edited versions drawn from her acclaimed recording of the complete cycle. These edits do not alter the substance of the works; rather, they refine the perception of time, revealing the emotional force of the music with renewed clarity.
Conceived in parallel with Figures of Glass, a hybrid project developed as a duo by Vanessa Wagner and Collectif Scale, the release extends a dialogue between piano and light, sound and space. At the heart of a scenographic installation, Vanessa Wagner interprets Glass’s Etudes by exploring the visual imagination embedded…
Tag Archive: Philip Glass
Founding work of minimalism, Music with Changing Parts is a piece with free instrumentation. The musicians choose which part to play among the 8 staves of the score. At each indicated cue, the musicians can change part, which produces an abrupt change of instrumentation. While the music is based on a melodic material limited to a few notes that are repeated in patterns that expand or contract, the changes in orchestration refresh the listening experience by producing sonic contrasts. These techniques at work in Music with Changing Parts, written in 1970, will lead Philip Glass to renew his language and move from the monochromatic works that precede it to more dramatic works such as music in 12 parts and especially…
Narrated by Suzanne Vega and performed by Belgian orchestra ICTUS and vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale Gent, ‘Einstein on the Beach’ re-imagines Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s influential (and divisive) 1976 opera as a 200-minute “minimalistic sound-bath”.
“We had no idea it was an opera,” explained Glass in 2013 to The Guardian when Einstein on the Beach was revived for a run in Melbourne. “You could call the piece anything you wanted to, but the only place we could perform it was an opera house. People began to talk about it as an opera. It was a discovery for us as it was for everybody else.” The truth is that it was an experiment – a long-form collaboration that attempted to skewer perceptions of narrative, instrumentation…
Friends for two decades, their creative partnership began when Philip Glass invited Tenzin Choegyal to perform at Carnegie Hall, igniting a dialogue between their two distinct yet deeply connected musical worlds. Choegyal is an acclaimed Tibetan artist whose music bridges ancestral tradition and contemporary expression. Raised in exile and now based in Australia, he channels his lineage through his art — shaping powerful compositions and serving as an ambassador for Tibetan culture and stories.
Be the Sky features original works from Choegyal and Glass’s two-decade collaboration, with Glass performing on the title track. The 7-track recording also spotlights performances by Scorchio Quartet, actress Saori Tsukada…
Philip Glass came late to serious piano study. Though he played from the age of seven on, it was really only as a student at Juilliard where he began to apply the kind of sustained effort that a professional career demanded. Even so, he was at a disadvantage in comparison to the child prodigies and wunderkinds who had been playing the concert circuit since grade school.
He wrote the first ten Études as a way to increase his skill, focusing each on an area where he felt he needed practice. As such, the Études were rarely performed in public or by anyone not named Philip Glass until fairly late in the composer’s career. A complete recorded set of the Études was not available until 2014. Since then a number of pianists have recorded the material:…
Having conducted Akhnaten, Satyagraha, and Einstein on the Beach, Léo Warynski’s no stranger to Philip Glass’s music.
Yet while that opera trilogy is well-established, his Another Look at Harmony – Part IV (1975) is less familiar and little-performed, which makes this recording by the vocal ensemble Les Métaboles, founded by the Paris Conservatoire-trained Warynski in 2010 and its name inspired by a Henri Dutilleux piece, all the more valuable. Joining the group’s sopranos, tenors, altos, and basses is organist Yoan Héreau, who’s collaborated with Warynski for many years on opera productions and contributed to several Les Métaboles recordings.
Warynski sees Another Look at Harmony – Part IV “as a kind of condensed sketch of…