Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 5

Philip Glass: Music:Violin Concerto / Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten / Company

news

calendar

biography

music

gallery

community

Page 1 of 5

contact

Violin Concerto / Prelude


and Dance from Akhnaten /
Company

recordings
compositions
books

(2000)

films
Music by Philip Glass
Ulster Orchestra
Adele Anthony, violin
Takuo Yuasa, conductor

glass engine
listen/watch

CATALOG:
Naxos 8.554568
TRACKS:
COMPANY
SEE ALSO

RELATED COMPOSITIONS:

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra


String Quartet No. 2 (Company)
Akhnaten
RELATED RECORDINGS:
Violin Concerto on Deutsche Grammophon

Violin Concerto on Telarc


Violin Concertos on Deutsche
Grammophon
Akhnaten on Sony Masterworks

1.

2:33

2.

II

1:56

3.

III

1:50

4.

IV

2:41

VIOLIN CONCERTO
5.

6:51

6.

II

8:32

7.

III

9:28

AKHNATEN
8.

Prelude

9.

Dance (Act II Scene III)

12:16
5:34

NOTES:
Born in Chicago in 1937 to Jewish immigrant
parents, the American composer Philip Glass
began his musical studies on the flute and
violin, going on to study with Steve Reich at
the Juilliard School in New York, and later
with Darius Milhaud in Aspen and Nadia
Boulanger in Paris. By the 1980s Glass had
already made a considerable reputation for
himself in the field of composition now
generally referred to as minimalism. In his
output from the mid-1960s onwards, he had
examined the possibilities inherent in
subjecting very small amounts of musical
material often just a few notes to
extensive repetition, in a style having some
similarities to those of his compatriots and
almost exact contemporaries, who include
Terry Riley and Steve Reich. For a decade
Glass's concern lay, like Reich's (the two
composers were friends for some of this
time), in the audibility of the musical
processes in particular the rhythmic
processes generated by this approach.
From 1968, all his compositions were written
for the amplified group consisting mainly of

http://www.philipglass.com/music/recordings/violin_concerto_aknaten_company.php

6-10-2008

Philip Glass: Music:Violin Concerto / Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten / Company

Page 2 of 5

flutes, saxophones, electric keyboards and,


later, voices that became the Philip Glass
Ensemble. In the mid-1970s, however, his
interest in the structural rigours of his music
lessened, and he began to reinvest melody
and harmony elements which had been
sidelined in the obsession with minimalist
processes with a new purchase on their
potential. Tunes and the sorts of chord
progressions which accompanied them in
more familiar kinds of Western music could
now be explored afresh in the surviving
context of minimalist repetition.
The result was a rather different kind of music
from compositions such as Music in Similar
Motion of 1969, or even Glass's first stage
work, Einstein on the Beach, conceived in
collaboration with the director and designer
Robert Wilson and premired in 1976. New
investigations of melody and, especially,
harmonic progression were already important
strategies enabling Glass to sustain musical
and dramatic interest over the several
unbroken hours of Einstein's duration. But it
was only when these had been allied with the
vocal and orchestral forces of the traditional
Western opera house forces much more
conventional than those of the composer's
own ensemble that he was able to fulfil his
new lyric and dramatic aspirations with the
resources which come as part of the natural
territory of twentieth-century opera. This new
approach partly a matter of text as well as
texture (the voices of the early Philip Glass
Ensemble did not sing texts as such, only
individual syllables or numbers) could also
be tested on more rock-orientated
endeavours. What Glass's music in the last
quarter of a century has lost in note-to-note
rigour, it has gained in range of expression.
While the differences between Glass's early
minimalist and later (post-?) minimalist scores
are considerable making possible not only
a greater range but also, as a consequence of
this, the composer's considerable success
since the early 1980s continuities between
the old Glass and the new abound. One of
these is his involvement with writing music for
the 'legitimate', rather than the musical,
theatre. The composer's first wife, JoAnne
Akalaitis, had been much involved with a
theatre group first formed during the couple's
years in Paris in 1964-6, which back in New
York eventually became known as Mabou
Mines. This group became particularly
associated not only with the plays but also
with other writings of Samuel Beckett, of
which the author allowed Mabou Mines to
make staged versions.
Company originated as instrumental music for
Fred Neumann's adaptation of Beckett's
prose text of the same name, mounted in
New York in January 1983; it was thus
composed around the same time as
Akhnaten. Like this opera, Glass's Company
is steeped in doom-laden arpeggios in minor
keys cross-cut with driving rhythms: features
shared, in fact, by all three compositions on
this disc. Beckett's Company concerned, as

http://www.philipglass.com/music/recordings/violin_concerto_aknaten_company.php

6-10-2008

Philip Glass: Music:Violin Concerto / Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten / Company

Page 3 of 5

so often with this author, with memory, but


unusually autobiographical involves a
solitary figure lying on his back in the dark:
the music's dark ruminations thus seem
entirely appropriate. As a concert piece, the
four short movements taken from this score
can be performed either by a string quartet (it
is also known as Glass's Second String
Quartet) or, as here, by a string orchestra.
Akhnaten, first performed in Stuttgart on 24th
March 1984, is the composer's third largescale stage work; it was conceived as the
final instalment of a trilogy with Einstein and
Satyagraha (1980), the latter, based on
Mahatma Gandhi's early years in South
Africa, being Glass's first opera for the forces
of the conventional Western opera house.
Akhnaten's subject is the Egyptian pharaoh of
the fourteenth century BC who is held to be
the first monotheist and whose radicalism led,
after seventeen turbulent years, to his
overthrow and presumed murder. The opera's
three acts show the rise and fall of Akhnaten
in a series of tableaux; the libretto is sung in a
mixture of ancient languages and English.
On the present recording, the opening
Prelude with its magnificently sustained arc of
tension and not-quite release is followed
by the Dance from Act Two, Scene 3 which,
in more obviously rhythmic fashion,
celebrates the inauguration of the city of
Akhetaten created by the new pharaoh; in an
actual production, musicians appear on stage
along with the rest of the cast. In both these
extracts, some unsettling metrical ambiguities
enhance the drama. And throughout the
opera, the predominatingly dark mood is
enhanced by the absence of violins from the
orchestra (an omission actually brought about
by practical restrictions on the Stuttgart
premire performances).
The Violin Concerto is the first of many
orchestral works that Glass has composed on
commission since the late 1980s, following
the acclaim accorded to Satyagraha and
Akhnaten. The choice of the concerto form
seemed a natural one for a composer then
currently obsessed with opera: he found it
'more theatrical and more personal' than
music for orchestra alone. The work was
premired by Paul Zukofsky and the
American Composers Orchestra under
Dennis Russell Davies in New York on 5th
April 1987. Both these musicians had worked
with Glass before: Zukofsky played the part of
Albert Einstein (in Einstein on the Beach the
character is represented by a solo violinist,
not a singer) in that stage work's first
performances; Davies had conducted the
premire of Akhnaten.
The concerto's familiar three-movement,
broadly fast-slow-fast, layout was in fact
accidental. Zukofsky, who collaborated
closely with the composer during the work's
gestation, had requested a slow, high finale.
Glass's original plan to have five short
movements changed in the course of

http://www.philipglass.com/music/recordings/violin_concerto_aknaten_company.php

6-10-2008

Philip Glass: Music:Violin Concerto / Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten / Company

Page 4 of 5

composing the piece, and he ended up with


two movements followed by a third one which
concludes with a slow coda making
references to the material of both previous
movements, thus also complying with his
soloist's wishes.
The composer's familiar repeated
arpeggiations, together with other types of
figuration likewise idiomatic meat and drink to
the fiddle, sometimes predominate over the
melodic impulse. Yet this choice of solo
instrument has also inspired lyrical material,
intercut with and sometimes counterpointing
the arpeggiations in quite dramatic fashion in
the first movement. The central movement's
set of variations on a descending bass line,
too, allows the solo part to soar and the
variations themselves to rise and fall in a
simple but moving progression, while the
coda to the finale brings another quite
dramatic movement, and the work as a whole,
to a rapt conclusion. The affecting minor
modes and chromatically shifting harmonies
of the Violin Concerto are entirely typical of
Glass's style at the time it was composed.
Keith Potter
NOTES ABOUT The players
Adele Anthony. Winner of the First Prize in
the 1996 Carl Nielsen International Violin
Competition in Denmark, Adele Anthony
made her earlier debut in 1983 with the
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and
subsequently appeared as a soloist with all
six symphony orchestras of the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation and with orchestras
in New Zealand. Her career has also brought
performances with leading orchestras and
collaboration with distinguished conductors
throughout Europe. Adele Anthony began
violin lessons at the age of two in Tasmania
and studied with Beryl Kimber as an Elder
Conservatorium Scholar at the University of
Adelaide until 1987. She later worked with
Dorothy DeLay, Felix Galimir and Hyo Kang
at the Juilliard School in New York, where she
held a number of scholarships and awards. A
series of competition triumphs include early
victory in the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation Instrumental and Vocal
Competition and in the 1992 Aspen Walton
Competition, and prizes in the 1993 Jacques
Thibaud Competition in Paris and the 1994
Hanover International Violin Competition. Her
recordings include a 1998 release of music by
Schubert for Naxos, in addition to recordings
for other labels. Adele Anthony plays a 1735
Guarneri del Ges violin on extended loan to
her from Clement Arrison, through The
Stradivari Society in Chicago.
Ulster Orchestra. Based in Belfast, Northern
Ireland, the Ulster Orchestra was formed in
1966 and has established itself as one of the
major symphony orchestras in the United
Kingdom. The orchestra's varied activities
include participation in the Belfast Festival at
Queen's and the Belfast Proms,
accompaniment to Opera Northern Ireland,

http://www.philipglass.com/music/recordings/violin_concerto_aknaten_company.php

6-10-2008

Philip Glass: Music:Violin Concerto / Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten / Company

Page 5 of 5

educational work and concerts throughout


Northern Ireland. The internationally
acclaimed Dmitry Sitkovetsky is the
orchestra's Principal Conductor and Artistic
Advisor, while Takuo Yuasa is Principal Guest
Conductor. The orchestra records and
broadcasts extensively for the BBC and has
acquired a high profile through its frequent
television appearances. In January 1997 the
orchestra gave the first public performance at
Belfast's new major performance venue, the
Waterfront Hall. This concert preceded the
broadcast on network television of the
orchestra's performance at the official
opening concert together with Dame Kiri Te
Kanawa, in the presence of HRH the Prince
of Wales. The Ulster Orchestra has made
over fifty commercial recordings, several of
which have received prestigious British
awards. Successful tours of Europe, Asia and
America have added to the growing
international reputation of the orchestra, as
have its regular appearances at the BBC
Henry Wood Promenade Concerts.
Takuo Yuasa. The highly regarded Japanese
conductor Takuo Yuasa has held positions as
Principal Conductor of the Gumma Symphony
Orchestra in Japan, Principal Guest
Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra and his current position as
Principal Guest Conductor of the Ulster
Orchestra in Belfast has been extended until
2002. He conducts extensively throughout the
Far East, Australia and Europe.
Takuo Yuasa was born in Osaka where he
studied piano, cello, flute and clarinet from an
early age. At eighteen he left Japan to study
in the USA at the University of Cincinnati
where he completed a Bachelor Degree in
Theory and Composition. He later moved to
Europe to study conducting with Igor
Markevitch, with Hans Swarowsky at the
Hochschule in Vienna and with Franco
Ferrara in Siena. Later he became assistant
to Lovro von Matacic, working with him in
Monte Carlo, Milan and Vienna.
CREDITS:
Music by Philip Glass. Performers: Adele
Anthony, Violin. Ulster Orchestra. Takuo
Yuasa, Conductor.
Recorded at Ulster Hall, Belfast, Northern
Ireland from 19th to 21st May, 1999. Producer
and Engineer: Tim Handley.
Cover Painting: Cendres Bleues 1987 by Tim
Smith.
Publisher: Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc.
NY.
2000 HNH International Ltd.

2008 Dunvagen Publishing, All Rights Reserve Home | Contact us about the Website

http://www.philipglass.com/music/recordings/violin_concerto_aknaten_company.php

6-10-2008

Вам также может понравиться