Philip Glass

NCH Dublin

To anyone whose interest in music is mainly musical, Philip Glass’s piano recital was thought-provoking. The National Concert Hall was packed with an appreciative audience that heard him play works written since the late 1970s, lasting some 110 minutes and with no interval.

As a performer of his own music, Glass is persuasive, even though his pianism is lax. In Dublin alone there are many pianists with more accomplished technique and a greater ability to make musical detail count. Yet, as a well-known published introduction to Glass puts it, he one of the most influential composers of our time – “a composer who has brought art music to the public”; and in that respect it couples his name with Kurt Weil and Leonard Bernstein.

Maybe. However, Glass has a distinctive ability to subvert the criteria on which rest the reputations of those masters of artified popular styles — and, indeed, of most art music. The very concept of the distinctive work is undermined when sound is so dominated by apparently simple “repetitive structures” (Glass’s term). Difference operates on such a minute scale that it becomes less significant than the hypnotic effect of repetition. Different works sound oddly alike.

It is not quite easy listening; but this concert made it clear that although some find the effect maddening, others find it both compelling and soothing. Rarely have I heard a quieter audience in the NCH.

This music is about something other than itself. It is no coincidence that Glass is a highly accomplished composer of music for film; and the concert's final item revealed this with unexpected force. One of the many important figures with whom Glass has collaborated is the late Allen Ginsberg. Glass played a recording of the poet reading his 1966 piece Wichita Vortex Sutra, and as Ginsberg's high-intensity voice surged and ebbed, he performed a piece written specifically to partner it. Music was a backdrop full of aural associations. In that case the associations were with something specific; but in other cases they can be to whatever one's imagination desires.