Опубликовано: 14 июн. 2015 г.Philip Glass
Satyagraha — World Premiere;
Stadsschouwburg, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;
September 5, 1980. Very good Dutch Radio broadcast.
Satyagraha (”insistence on truth”) is a 1979 opera in three acts for orchestra, chorus and soloists, composed by Philip Glass, with a libretto by Glass and Constance DeJong. Loosely based on the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, it forms the second part of Glass’s “Portrait Trilogy” of operas about men who changed the world, which also includes Einstein On The Beach and Akhnaten. The title refers to Gandhi’s concept of non-violent resistance to injustice, Satyagraha, and the text, from the Bhagavad Gita, is sung in the original Sanskrit. [The opera is semi-narrative in form and deals with Mahatma Gandhi’s early years in South Africa and his development of non-violent protest into a political tool.]
Satyagraha was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam, Netherlands, and first performed at the Stadsschouwburg (Municipal Theatre) there on September 5, 1980, by the Netherlands Opera and the Utrecht Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bruce Ferden. — wikipedia
In Satyagraha, Glass is confident he has an enduring hit, People magazine reported. “We’ve had 70 years of pieces since Schoenberg that no one understands,” he argues, “so there’s nothing really wrong, is there, with a little contemporary music being appealing?”
• (Act 3) • Martin Luther King, Jr. • 1:36:11 Newcastle March 46:19
Performers:
Miss Schlesen — Claudia Cummings, soprano
Mrs Naidoo — Iris Hashishkee, soprano
Kasturbai — Beverly Morgan, contralto
Mahatma Ghandi — Douglas Perry, tenor
Mr Kallenbach — Bruce Hall, bariton
Parsi Rustomji — Richard Gill, bass
Mrs Alexander — Rhonda Lyss, contralto
Lord Krishna — Tom Heanen, bass
Prince Arjana — René Claassen, tenor
Choir of the Rotterdam Conservatorium
Utrecht Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Bruce Ferden
Rotterdamse Schouwburg — September 5, 1980
Commissioned by the City of Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Dutch Radio Recording
Music in Twelve Parts, written by Philip Glass in 1971-1974, is a deliberate, encyclopedic compendium of some techniques of repetition the composer had been evolving since the 60s. It holds an important place in Glass's repertory — not only historically (as the longest and most ambitious concert piece for the Philip Glass Ensemble) but aesthetically as well. Music in Twelve Parts is both a massive theoretical exercise and a deeply engrossing work of art.
In the past, Glass vociferously objected to being called a minimalist composer. He now grudgingly accepts the term — with the distinction that it only applies to his earliest pieces, those up to and including Music in Twelve Parts. It is difficult to see how such a mammoth work as Einstein on the Beach can possibly be called minimalist and Glass now speaks of himself as a composer of music with repetitive structures.
Part I remains some of the most soulful music Glass ever wrote, yet it is also one of his most reductive compositions: at any place in the music, reading vertically in the score, both a C# and an F# are being played somewhere in the instrumentation. Through skillful contrapuntal weaving, Glass creates a drone that is not a drone — an active, abundant, richly fertile stasis.
Part I leads directly into Part II, which introduces a different key, a faster tempo, greater rhythmic and melodic variety and the human voice. «A new sound and a new chord suddenly break in, with an effect as if one wall of a room had suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view.»
Part III, one of the few self-contained movements, is a gurgling study in fourths, and one of the shortest. Part IV is extraordinary: after a brief introduction, it becomes a lengthy examination of a single, unsettled chord that sweats, strains and ultimately screams for resolution until the musicians suddenly break into the joyous, rushing catharsis of Part V.
Part VI is another example of how Glass can take what initially seems a standard chord progression and gradually build considerable interest on the part of his audience as he presents it to us, again and again, from different rhythmical perspectives. Part VII clearly derives from Music in Similar Motion, but the development is much more swift than that of the earlier work and it is infinitely more virtuosic (the soprano, in particular, does her best to avoid tongue-twisting and sibilance in the exposed, rapid-fire melismatic passages). And the close of Part VIII prefigures the «Train» scene in Einstein on the Beach, with its irresistible forward motion and sheer, «boy-with-a-gadget» fascination with a systematic augmentation and contraction of the soprano line.
«I had a specific purpose in mind when I set to work on Twelve Parts. I wanted to crystallize in one piece all the ideas of rhythmic structure that I'd been working on since 1965. By the time I got to Part VIII, I'd pretty much finished what I'd started out to do. And so the last movements were different. Parts IX and X were really about ornamentation.» Part IX, after a lithe, bouncing, broken-chord introduction, becomes a study in chromatic unison while Part X begins with a blaring, aggressively reiterated figure in the winds that is eventually softened cushioned — by the addition of complementary figures in the bass.
Parts I-X had all been based on stable harmonic roots that had remained constant throughout the movement. Part XI is just as rigorous in its application of an antithetical approach: the harmony changes with every new figure. In Part XI, which is essentially an aria for soprano and ensemble, there is more harmonic motion than in all of the mature works Glass had composed in the previous ten years put together.
Music in Twelve Parts ends with a musical joke that may be amusing to those who remember the musical politics of the 60s & 70s. Like most young composers of the time, Glass was trained to write twelve-tone music; unlike most of them, he rejected the movement entirely. And yet, in the bass line of Part XII, toward the end, the careful listener will discern a twelve-tone row, underpinning this riot of tonal, steadily rhythmic, gleeful repetition -underpinning, in other words, all the things that textbook twelve-toners shunned.
«It was a way of making fun not only of others but also of myself. I had broken the rules of modernism and so I thought it was time to break some of my own rules. And this I did, with the shifts of harmony in Part XI and then in Part XII, where, for the first and only time in my mature music, I threw in a twelve-tone row. This was the end of minimalism for me. I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end. I'd taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put back in — a process that would occupy me for many years to come.»
AMAZING: Maki Namekawa plays Philip Glass Piano Etude No 9 & No 20 HD (dir. Andreas H. Bitesnich)
Опубликовано: 30 янв. 2016 г.Directed, filmed and edited by ANDREAS H. BITESNICH.
Styling: Nina Kepplinger
Make Up and Hair: Wolfgang Lindenhofer
Sound recording: Robert Lunak
Assistant: Christoph Kaltenbacher
Assistant: Michael Obex
Technician at Ars Electronica Center: Florian Wanninger
Опубликовано: 23 нояб. 2012 г.Philip Glass — The Photographer
«The Photographer is a chamber opera by composer Philip Glass that is based on the homicide trial of photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The opera is based on words drawn from the trial as well as Muybridge's letters to his wife. Commissioned by the Holland Festival, the opera was first performed in 1982 at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.»
From Wikipedia.
Vinyl record ripped at 24 bit 96KHZ and encoded with NeroAAC with -q 0.75 (500~ Kbps). Both sides of been mixed into a single track for this video. Picture changes once side B begins.
Опубликовано: 24 дек. 2015 г.Thank you all. This channel family has reached the so joyous amount of 1000 subscribers! Never bad for a Christmas present! As a gift related to number 10, here I give you the premiere of Philip Glass’ 10th Symphony. / Gracias a todos, esta familia de canales ha alcanzado la feliz cantidad de ¡1000 suscriptores! ¡Nada mal para un regalo de navidad! Como recompensa relacionada con el número 10, aquí les ofrezco el estreno de la sinfonía 10 de Philp Glass.
Bruckner Orchestra of Linz conducted by/ Orquesta Bruckner de Linz dirigida por Dennis Russell Davies.
Philip Glass composed originally the music for his Symphony No. 10 as an incidental score for the closing ceremony of Expo 2008 at Zaragoza, Spain. However, considering its original instrumentation could lead the piece to oblivion and looking at its full orchestral potential, Glass decided to orchestrate it. It is a symphony that is certainly filled with Arab and Spanish feels as the city was an important urban center in Muslim and in Modern Spain, thus musically recalling those historical moments of the city.
Philip Glass compuso originalmente la música de su décima sinfonía como una partitura incidental para la ceremonia de clausura de la Expo 2008 en Zaragoza. Sin embargo, considerando que su instrumentación original podría llevar la pieza al olvido y que la obra tenía un enorme potencial orquestal, Glass decidió orquestarla. Es una sinfonía que está llena de sentimientos arábigos e hispánicos al haber sido la ciudad un centro urbano importante tanto en la España musulmana como en la moderna, recordando de manera musical aquellos momentos históricos de la ciudad.
Image/ imagen: Plaza from Expo 2008 center at Zaragoza. / Plaza de la Expo 2008 de Zaragoza.