Glass: Symphony No.9

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Composed on commission from the Bruckner Orchester Linz, Carnegie Hall, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philip Glass' Symphony No.9 receives it's world premiere here on a from Orange ain Music. Written for large symphony orchestra with expanded brass and percussion, Glass' three-movement work received it's US premiere at Carnegie Hall on January 31, 2012, Glass' 75th birthday. This is conducted by Glass' long-time collaborator Dennis Russell Davies, conductor and music director of the Bruckner Orchester Linz, Landestheater, and the Sinfonie Orchester Basel, who has premiered all but one Glass symphony. The Bruckner Orchester Linz continues it's long association with the music of Philip Glass having performed and recorded his sixth, seventh and eighth symphonies, as well as staging of his operas the Voyage, Kepler and Orphe. Review ------ For reasons more to do with superstition than with logic, people regard a composer s ninth symphony as a milestone. But Mr. Glass did not appear to have been fazed by Beethoven s shadow. His Symphony No. 5, with its sweeping choral writing and its text drawn from various sacred writings, seems to be his most direct response to Beethoven s Choral Symphony. Other works in Mr. Glass s symphonic canon are livelier and more colorful than this new offering. The First and Fourth Symphonies, after all, meld Mr. Glass s style with themes from David Bowie s Low and Heroes albums. His Sixth Symphony, Plutonium Ode, draws considerable power from the Allen Ginsberg poem that inspired it. And for sheer visceral drive the Eighth Symphony is hard to beat. The Ninth is a texturally dense, changeable score, dark and melancholy at its beginning and end and in parts of its richly melodic slow movement, but bright and hard driven in long stretches elsewhere. Mr. Glass s signature moves are all there: the rising woodwind arpeggios, dotted brass chords, swirling flutes and alternating sections of downbeat and upbeat percussion emphasis, all Glassian equivalents of the Alberti basses and Mannheim rockets of Baroque and Rococo times. But there are new touches too: among them, varied percussion effects (from snare drums to castanets) and long-lined, gently chromatic string writing. --New York Times The new symphony, a three-movement piece lasting fifty minutes, digs a little deeper. The Protest theme from Satyagraha is echoed at the beginning, setting a sombre mood worthy of a Ninth. The structure is unpredictable, with the plaintive middle movement enclosing a tumultuous dance and the outer movements fading into ghostly codas suggestive of the wasteland endings of Shostakovich s Fourth and Fifteenth Symphonies. The harmony is, in places, arrestingly thick and hazy, the layering of motifs engagingly contrapuntal. --New Yorker Magazine Since Beethoven, Ninth Symphonies have been both a cause of joy and dread. In the wake of Beethoven s No. 9, composers view that massive, ethereal, choral symphony as a sort of musical Everest. And then there's the fact that the composer never lived to write a 10th. Gustav Mahler, so fearful of embarking on a Ninth Symphony of his own, insisted that the large orchestral work after his Eighth Symphony be titled The Song of the Earth. Mahler eventually swallowed his fears and wrote another large work and called it his Ninth Symphony -- it can be heard at Walt Disney Hall three times this weekend as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Mahler cycle -- but the fact that he died the following year while writing his 10th Symphony only added to the mystique around Ninths. The theme of mortality was certainly in the air Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall, which saw the American debut of Philip Glass Ninth Symphony. Reached by phone two days after the premiere, Glass admitted, Everyone is afraid to do a Ninth Symphony. It s not that it killed off Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler ... but it is a funny kind of jinx that people think about. You get nervous, Glass said, these are silly things Ninth Symphony, what kind of silly jinx is that? But I wasn t going to wait to find out. --Los Angeles Times