Philip Glass: Suite from “The Hours”; Tirol Concerto. Simone Dinnerstein, piano and conducting Barocklyn strings. Naïve. $16.99.
David Bird: Hinterlands; Ambient Machine; Chroma; American City. New Focus Recordings. $20.99.
Fans of Philip Glass’ particular brand of minimalism may have found a particularly interesting application of it in the 2002 film The Hours. Philip Glass Ensemble Director Michael Riesman and pianist Simone Dinnerstein certainly did: the former arranged a suite from the movie music that the latter has now recorded with her 11-member ensemble, Barocklyn (the name being a rather silly portmanteau of Baroque and Brooklyn). The music is richer-sounding than much of Glass’ work, and the composer’s tendency to remain in one place, aurally speaking, while having his music metamorphose very slowly into new forms, fits the film quite well: its plot deals with the interconnections in the lives of three women from different time periods – Virginia Woolf in 1941, the year of her suicide; a pregnant, unhappily married housewife in 1951; and a lesbian in 2001 who is preparing a party for an author who has AIDS and whose mother, it turns out in one of several elements of connection, is the housewife from 50 years earlier. The film is very earnest and attuned to contemporary sensibilities, and it received nine Academy Award nominations and won in one category. It and the novel on which it drew were also adapted, in 2022, into an opera with music by Kevin Puts. The music that Glass created for the film won a BAFTA award and received one of the Academy Award nominations, and is not quite as unceasingly bleak as the movie itself. Certainly Riesman, who played the piano for the score in the movie itself, has a good sense of assembling a suite from it – and, indeed, previously worked with Nico Muhly on an arrangement for piano solo. With all this provenance and all this recognition, one would be justified in expecting a more-exceptional score and suite for piano, strings, harp and celesta than Glass and Riesman actually provide. Shorn of a connection to events occurring on screen, the music sounds fine, with surface-level emotion of the sort common in movie music, and is played quite well by Dinnerstein and her ensemble; but its inevitable repetitiveness and its swells and diminutions are straightforward and, out of context, scarcely gripping. It is paired on this Naïve CD with the 2000 Tirol Concerto, Glass’ first piano concerto, in which the composer incorporates elements from his earlier piano Études. The concerto, scored for piano and strings, has a central movement that is intended as the heart of the work, being longer than its first and third put together. Its title comes from Glass’ use of a traditional Tyrolean song called Maria! Hilf mir doch! In performance, the overextended second movement is less engaging than it keeps trying to be and does not come across as well as the finale, in which Glass manages to keep a sense of forward motion while still using some of the stasis-generating techniques he commonly employs. Both Glass works here are somewhat more accessible than much of his earlier work, and the very fine playing puts them across as effectively as possible. The disc will certainly be of interest to listeners who are already fans of the composer, although the music is not convincing enough to widen his appeal.
Glass, himself a pianist, has a long and somewhat complex relationship with electronic music, with his Philip Glass Ensemble regularly using electronically amplified woodwinds and keyboard synthesizers. And he is scarcely the only contemporary composer for whom acoustic and electronic sounds – and their contrasts – are germane to different works. David Bird (born 1990) uses sound generation in multiple ways in the pieces on a New Focus Recordings release that is of short duration (43 minutes) but considerable sonic density. It opens with Hinterlands, played by an ensemble called lovemusic (no capitalization: an affectation). The group’s mixture of flute (Emiliano Gavito), clarinet (Adam Starkie), and viola (Sophie Wahlmüller), with electric guitar (Christian Lozano Sedano) and electronics (Finbar Hosie), exemplifies Bird’s thinking about the differing roles of forms of sound generation. The work’s inspiration is technological, so the domination of electronic material is scarcely a surprise: the piece uses unexceptional layering of aural elements to produce a series of machinelike sounds and effects. It is followed by Ambient Machine, which, despite its title, is for acoustic instruments: bassoon (Ben Roidl-Ward) and cello (Isidora Nojkovic). However, the reason for its name becomes clear immediately through the amplification and constant electronic manipulation of the sound of both instruments; indeed, the identifiability of wind and string sound origination is barely present. After this on the CD is Chroma, an ensemble piece, performed by the Grossman Ensemble under Jeffrey Meyer. It is all about timbre and the creation of a kind of soundcloud that expands and contracts and metamorphoses slowly into formlessness of various kinds. Concluding the disc is the three-movement American City, for string quartet (the Mivos Quartet). This work offers a series of electronic sound extensions, technical alterations and aural expansions that are well-differentiated among the movements but uniformly difficult to listen to because, by design, they are supposed to reflect the dehumanization inherent in industrialization. There are interesting elements here and there in all these pieces, but never enough to sustain them from start to finish: sound immersion for its own sake is dominant throughout, and once it is established, there is nowhere significant for the material to go. Actually, the most intriguing element of the CD – for anyone who cares to look into the nonmusical background of Bird’s work – is the title American City, which refers not to a place in the United States but to Magnitogorsk in Russia. That is a city developed for ore mining in Soviet days with the assistance of a consulting firm from Cleveland that helped create a copy of a steel mill then operating in Gary, Indiana – after which industry was developed along the lines used in the 1930s in Gary and in Pittsburgh. In the case of Bird’s music, though, knowledge of this intriguingly odd inspiration does little to enhance understanding of the piece itself: the sounds that Bird calls for speak clearly enough of technology and dehumanization on their own, but not in any significant ways beyond those offered by many other modern composers who build their own creations by technological means.
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