Barely a month after I’d seen a sumptuous new production in Geneva of my favourite Philip Glass opera, Einstein on the Beach, it was a no-brainer to make the flight over to Dublin to see Glass and his Ensemble play my favourite of all his compositions, the epic (just shy of four hours, by my reckoning) Music in Twelve Parts. This was the second day of a three-day Glass residency, which also included a pre-concert conversation on the Friday and a live soundtrack performance of Koyaanisqatsi on the Sunday, of which more in a moment.

This was the third time I had seen the Ensemble play Music in Twelve Parts, the first being at the Barbican in 2007, the second in Ostrava in 2013. Looking back at my review of the latter performance, I find I said there pretty much all I have to say about this work, so I’ll just leave a brief quote here:

“There’s no feeling in music comparable to the one you get as Glass’s hypnotically repeating patterns drill relentlessly into your head, only for the tiniest harmonic shift to come along and burst the whole shebang open. Alive with light and rainbow hues, gripped by an inner compulsion to thrive and regenerate, Music in Twelve Parts is total music, flowing endlessly through you and leaving you changed forever.”

A few additional, random observations. The acoustics in the hall were exceptionally clear and, pleasingly, somewhat on the loud side. (I’m reminded of a remark made to me by the composer and former Glass associate Michael Nyman after a concert of his in Vienna: “This should have been so much louder.”) Lisa Bielawa was a total revelation on soprano vox, especially in the tumultuous rush of Part 12 with which the evening concluded. The way she added repeated utterances to the key phrase around which the part revolves, to which the ensemble responded each time with yet another mantric repetition, was nothing less than miraculous. As for the music, I was overwhelmed by its endless cyclical patterns and ecstatic transitions, and by the zest with which the keyboards and woodwinds interwove to produce music of sharp, hallucinatory clarity.

The most unfortunate aspect of the weekend, however, was that Glass was not well. He was his usual dryly funny self at the conversation on Friday, but even from my seat in row S on the Saturday I could tell that he was struggling to keep up with the daunting requirements of the score. I and a few other hardcore fans hung around by the stage door after the concert, and when he emerged he was unsteady on his feet and had to be helped onto the tour bus. He pulled out of Sunday night’s Koyaanisqatsi concert and the performance of Music with Changing Parts that took place in London a few days later, and has already withdrawn from a scheduled performance of the Qatsi trilogy in Paris next month. The Ensemble played or will play all of these concerts without him. I wish him a full and speedy recovery, and look forward to more European concerts in the future.

In recent years Philip Glass seems to have reached new heights of popularity and pre-eminence, cementing his status as the world’s greatest living composer. Now in his 83rd year, Glass is performing sell-out concerts in Europe and North America, while his major operas are regularly performed at the world’s leading opera houses. Bolstered by a relentless stream of posts on his social media accounts (not by the man himself, needless to say), it’s clear that an awful lot of people are coming very late indeed to Philip Glass. The days when I sat among half-empty audiences in London and my home town of Salisbury at Glass concerts, even with the composer himself present, are long gone.

In a further sign of this ever-growing recognition, a Glass opera was chosen to reopen the splendid Grand Théâtre in Geneva after extensive renovation work lasting three years. And, gratifyingly, it wasn’t a relatively safe choice like Akhnaten or Satyagraha that they went for, but Glass’ most demanding and difficult work, Einstein on the Beach. Like the original 1976 production, which I saw revived in London in 2012, this new Einstein was billed as the joint work of Glass and Robert Wilson. There was, however, precious little sign of Wilson’s original visual concepts for the opera in this version by the Swiss theatre director Daniele Finzi Pasca. This openness is of course mandated by the official notes to the opera, which state that “the producer has two options: to reproduce the original Robert Wilson production (which exists on videotape), or to create a new series of stage and dance pictures based on themes relating to the life of Albert Einstein.”

Whereas Wilson’s stage designs were steeped in formalist rigour, all space, light and surface, those of Finzi Pasca leapt out at the viewer with a vivid, haunting intensity. Scene after scene left me slack-jawed in wonderment, the visuals forming a dreamlike and ravishing accompaniment to the dizzying spirals of Glass’ score. There are too many highlights to mention, but the most memorable images included Einstein’s assistants filmed from above, their onstage movements projected onto a massive screen which made them seem to be climbing, falling and floating at will; the lovely water nymph in a long, flowing orange dress, her graceful underwater movements watched impassively by a beautiful white horse; the forest of interlacing tubes that glowed in many colours as they glided smoothly around the stage; the gorgeous shadowplay of cyclists and mermaids as they crossed and recrossed the stage as dancing silhouettes; and the bathers on the beach, playing badminton, wrestling with deckchairs and crabs, throwing beach balls and juggling in remarkably expert fashion. (Was Finzi Pasca aware, I wonder, that juggling also formed part of the stagecraft at the ENO’s triumphant production of Akhnaten which I saw in London three years ago? If not, it was a remarkable coincidence.)

As for the music, it was filled with everything I’ve come to love about Glass. Swirling and eddying with immense mathematical precision, it seemed to embody the paradox of the opera’s title and of that time in Einstein’s life which inspired it: that a man of such formidable intellect could be found among the endlessly rippling tides of the seashore.¹ The choir and musicians, made up of students from the Haute École de Musique de Genève under the direction of Titus Engel, responded magnificently to the considerable demands placed upon them by the score. The sung texts, consisting mainly of numbers and solfège syllables, were delivered with breathtaking vigour and stamina, while the music (including sublime solos for violin and saxophone) held me rapt for every second of the opera’s four-hour duration. Although the producers were at pains to emphasize that members of the audience were free to come and go as they wished, I for one remained rooted to my seat throughout.

A few days earlier, I’d kicked off this mini-Glass festival in Geneva with a visit to far-flung Lignon to see a work that was new to me, his chamber opera interpretation of Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony. I wasn’t bowled over by this one, to tell you the truth. The score, played expertly by a string quintet of musicians from Geneva’s Ensemble Contrechamps, was as refulgent and animated as any late-period Glass, but I quickly became bored and then irritated by the onstage movements of the two singers and their constant shifting, like besuited removal men, of two large mirrored crates-cum-video-screens exactly into place. Meanwhile, the libretto by Rudy Wurlitzer (who also wrote the screenplay for the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, fact fans) and the excerpts from Kafka’s text read by a disembodied voice offstage were gruelling stuff.

Finally, a word on the ticketing arrangements for Einstein, which frankly bordered on the farcical. From the moment this event was announced, I was aware that it was both part of the La Bâtie festival and also a regular production of the Grand Théâtre of Geneva. On the morning tickets went on sale, however, the GTG’s website had no link to any ticket-buying portal. I therefore bought them from the La Bâtie website, naturally assuming that there was no other source to be found. Having gone through the ticket-buying process and been relieved of a not insignificant sum of money, I discovered to my displeasure that the tickets I’d bought were not for individually numbered seats but were for unspecified seats within a block, and were to be exchanged for numbered tickets on the day of the show. When I turned up at the Grand Théâtre for the show, I was shocked to find that the tickets I’d been allocated were way off to the side of the auditorium, seats I would never have chosen if I’d been given the opportunity to select individual seats. Only after I’d bought tickets did the La Bâtie website give the information that it was also possible to select seats on the GTG ticket portal, by which time it was too late.

Note

1. See Einstein’s Long Island Summer of ’39:
https://www.longislandpress.com/2013/02/01/einstein-on-the-beach/

The last time I saw Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts was way back in 2007. This was at the Barbican Centre in London, as part of a weekend devoted to Glass’s music that also included his collaboration with Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing. I hadn’t really got up to speed with this blog back then, so the review I wrote at the time was woefully short (it neglects to mention, for example, that Cohen sat in the row behind me for the performance of Music in Twelve Parts, and indeed stayed for the whole thing). Since, however, this is the cycle that encapsulates everything I love about Glass’s music, it was a no-brainer to make the trip to Ostrava to catch it again.

A word on the venue and the festival of which this concert formed part, both of which were rather special. A tough mining city in the industrial heartland of the Czech Republic, Ostrava is not often mentioned as a stop-off on the international funded arts circuit. Yet the city puts on a biennial festival of contemporary classical music, Ostrava Days, which this year included visits from not only Glass, but also from Christian Wolff and other New Music luminaries as well. As for the location, it was extraordinary. Situated in the middle of a disused ironworks in the suburb of Vitkovice, the concert took place in a former gas holder which has been beautifully converted into a 1,400-seater concert hall – a project from which those responsible for the unattractive Gasometer site in Vienna might well learn some painful lessons. My only complaint relates to the pitiful provision of food and drink at the venue. With over 1,000 people coming down for a five-hour event, the organizers really should have cottoned on to the fact that two people serving drinks and two more manning what was essentially a wurst stand was never going to be enough. The queues during the intermissions were simply horrendous.

As for the music, it was a phantasmagoric whirl of melody and harmony that I found utterly captivating. I’m no musicologist and have nothing to say about the theoretical basis of the piece; what I can say is that it is sheerly, head-spinningly enjoyable from start to finish. It’s become a cliché to cite Glass’s objection to being labelled as a minimalist composer; nevertheless, listening to Music in Twelve Parts in its entirety makes clear the inadequacy of the term to describe what he is doing in a piece like this. If minimalism can be loosely defined as music where nothing much happens, then I’m happy to ascribe it to people like Glass’s near contemporaries La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine, concerts by both of whom I snoozed through in London in the 1990s. Palestine is a particularly egregious example. Seen stumbling around the Gong on Friday night in his usual ridiculous get-up, bawling out the staff and coming late into the auditorium, he stated in a 1996 interview that “by the end of the 70s I found myself in direct competition with the commercial minimalism of Reich, Glass, Adams; cutesy New Age composers who were diluting minimal piano music to Richard Clayderman-like spiritual pissings.” In response to which I can only wonder who Palestine is trying to kid if he sees himself as competing in any shape or form with the likes of Glass and Reich.

Anyway, it seems to me that, far from Music in Twelve Parts being a work of minimalism, it actually teems with activity in the midst of the repetitive structures that form the basis of the piece. Listen to the thrilling rush of keyboard clusters hammered out by Glass, Michael Riesman and Mick Rossi, and it’s never long before Jon Gibson, David Crowell or Andrew Sterman (last heard by me laying down the mighty sax solo in Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, by the way) slip in with elegant, gently pulsating threads of sax and flute. Not to mention the shape-shifting vox of soprano Lisa Bielawa, whose uncanny syllables lend the piece a vivid extra dimension of colour and clarity.

In fact, Music in Twelve Parts seems almost synaesthetic; it’s music driven by an immense, transformative urge to fuck with your senses. There’s no feeling in music comparable to the one you get as Glass’s hypnotically repeating patterns drill relentlessly into your head, only for the tiniest harmonic shift to come along and burst the whole shebang open. Alive with light and rainbow hues, gripped by an inner compulsion to thrive and regenerate, Music in Twelve Parts is total music, flowing endlessly through you and leaving you changed forever.

I have very little knowledge of, and normally no interest in, the world of opera, but on this occasion I found it impossible to resist the enticing prospect of a new work by Philip Glass, with a libretto by ageing Austrian literary enfant terrible Peter Handke, being shown in the magnificent setting of the brand spanking new Musiktheater in Linz. I figured a little bit of self-education in this most baffling of genres wouldn’t do me any harm. I also knew Glass wouldn’t be there in person, but that didn’t matter too much (although I’m still smarting from his failure to show up at the Barbican for Einstein on the Beach last year).

In all honesty, though, I’m not sure I’m any the wiser having sat through 2¼ hours of Spuren der Verirrten (which seems to be going by the English title The Lost, although even I with my imperfect German can tell it should be “Traces of the Lost”). The opera was visually dazzling and brilliantly performed, but Handke’s determinedly opaque text (handily translated on a little screen in front of me) made it more or less impossible for me to fathom out what was going on from one scene to the next. Trace elements of the Austrian’s longstanding preoccupations were there right from the start. In the arresting opening, a character known only as the Spectator entered the audience, bawled them out and was filmed doing so; a reference to a goalkeeper followed shortly afterwards.

As the opera went on, the Spectator made occasional reappearances to comment on the action, such as it was. For the most part, the evening consisted of baleful dialogues on war, tragedy and death, sung by various characters from the large cast. These were played out against a constantly changing backdrop of stunning visual images, ranging from the disturbing (row upon row of hospital beds) to the playful (a huge Austrian scene with hares, alphorns and dancers in Tracht). Beautifully lit in deep saturated hues, the massive revolving stage swarmed with activity as crowds of singers and dancers surged around the leads. The effect was mesmerizing, although Handke’s libretto would remain incoherent to the end.

As for the music, it was quintessential late-period Glass: swirling, heady and blissfully romantic. The hypnotic repetitions that dominate early works like Einstein on the Beach and Music in 12 Parts (which I’m very much looking forward to seeing in the Czech Republic later this year, by the way) were still there but softer, more tender and more mutable. Played with glowing artistry by the Bruckner Orchestra under long-time Glass acolyte Dennis Russell Davies, Glass’s score was the emotional heart on which this labyrinthine opera depended for much of its impact. As if in recognition of this, the finale saw the entire orchestra transplanted to the stage, while the cast took the orchestra’s place in the pit, furiously mugging the movements of the players. It was a deliriously joyful ending to this strange, fascinating evening.