Glass: Portrait / Angele Dubeau & La Pieta

Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà

Philip Glass: La Belle et la bete (Overture); The Hours Suite; "Mishima", Quartet No.3; "Company", Quartet No.2

Minimalism and postminimalism. It would be hopelessly reductive to sum up the particularly fertile oeuvre of Philip Glass—one of America’s most celebrated contemporary composers—with these two words. They do, however, encompass some of the main thrusts of his work. For instance, he treats the notion of time completely differently, not as a continuity but rather as a succession of moments that fall into one another, without any relationship of cause and effect. As Glass explains in the September 1999 issue of Le Monde de la musique, “We came out of experimental theatre rather than a traditional education imparted by learned professors: our roots were John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the Living Theatre, Grotowsky and Genet. The idea of a different kind of time, one with flexible duration, came more from Beckett than from Indian raga.” Moreover, by choosing to treat sound as neutrally as possible, Glass conveyed a desire to abandon reason altogether. By letting themselves be guided primarily by sensations, listeners better perceive the relative flexibility of time and the shimmer of the melodic units, which combine and divide as they seem to build, inducing a meditative state, doorway to a chaotic world that lacks any point of reference or apparent logic, yet nevertheless seems perfectly natural. With this recording, Angèle Dubeau strives to paint a dramatic portrait of the composer through some of his most significant works for strings.

Price: $18.98

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