Sound of breaking glass

The concerts by Philip Glass at the Belfast Festival last week brought mixed reactions. The audiences, mostly made up of young people, were enthusiastic. The applause was mixed with lots of whistling, and the end of every show saw individuals rushing to their feet. But there were also listeners who responded with indignation and outrage.

Glass's statements in Belfast suggested that one of his lifelong concerns has been re-combining elements of theatre. This preoccupation could be experienced variously in La Belle et la Bete, Koyaanisqatsi, and Monsters of Grace.

The first is a re-working of Cocteau's 1946 film, with the original soundtrack and music removed, and live music from the Philip Glass Ensemble's voices, synthesisers and winds in its place. The words are sung in not-very-convincing French, the synchronisation is none-too-exact, and the music goes its own Glassy way. Pointing up, intersecting with, or countering the content or images of the film from any interesting or meaningful angle seems to have been a marginal concern.

With nary a hint of hi-tech tricksiness, Cocteau managed to create one of the most utterly magical films of all time. Glass's only achievement is to strip away from, and diminish the original.

It's much easier to see the point of Glass's music to the heartfelt, wordless eco-sermon of Godfrey Reggio's often breathtakingly beautiful film Koyaanisqatsi, first released in 1983. The subtlety of the visual composition (unfortunately abandoned towards the end) is not often matched by either the message or the accompanying music. And if the film really means what it seems to be saying, what's the point in having it shown with an electronically-dependent, reverberation-swamped live performance (even one of the singers' voices was "electronically replicated") that would appear to be so alien to its ethos?

Monsters of Grace, the much-hyped 3-D, digital "opera", with a visual concept by Robert Wilson - singers and musicians onstage in a darkened auditorium beneath a screen showing projected, computer-generated images with 3-D effects visible to wearers of specially-provided polarised glasses - did provide some moments of frisson, not least through the in-your-face finger-pointing of a disembodied hand. But often the movements of the images were tiresomely drawn out, as though, if anything is good, it will be even better slower. And someone in the know claimed strongly that, as 3D effects go, Monsters of Grace had nothing on the Muppet Show in Disneyworld.

The sampled sound of Persian instruments provided change from the earlier days and offered a certain relief to the ear. The very opening promised much, by showing a momentary departure from oh-so-well established musical procedure. And the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, as translated and adapted by Coleman Banks, is a real find. But otherwise it was business as usual. As in the Cocteau, the words were set with a chant-like monotony that would as readily serve a shopping list or airport announcement.

In Belfast, Glass offered the opinion that "The composer's first problem is to find a voice. The second is to get rid of it." And so say all of us.

Glass is not the only minimalist attracted by the novelties of multimedia opera. Fellow-American Steve Reich, like Glass, now in his early 60s, has completed Hindenburg, the first of Three Tales, with the video artist Beryl Korot - the other tales will be Bikini (the atom bomb and its consequences), and Dolly (the brave new world opened up by the first cloned sheep).

Hindenburg, which received its first complete UK performance at the closing of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival on Sunday, is an angry, bellicose warning about technology. It takes as its starting point the tragedy of the German dirigible, the Hindenburg, destroyed in 1937 in a mid-air explosion which was captured on film. The images are subjected in Korot's film, (along with newspaper clippings and other documentary material), to video-wall multiplicity and computer movie-clip looping.

From Hindenburg the flying machine, to Hindenburg the man, to Hitler, Reich and Korot lay things on thickly, the music throbbing with militaristic violence, parrot-like irony in the imitation of words between singers and documentary source. It's a million miles away from Monsters of Grace, but quite a way away, too, from the freer world of the other Reich pieces which featured in the programme, the evergreen Music for Pieces of Wood, Sextet, and Proverbs. In Hindenburg, it's the message which seems to burden the music rather than be carried along or be amplified by it.

Both Hindenburg and Monsters of Grace triggered the strangest association in my mind - with Pietro Raimondi. This little-known, 19th-century Italian composer wrote, in the 1840s, a "triple oratorio", three works to be performed separately on successive nights, and then together on a fourth. He later wrote a comic opera and a tragic opera that could be treated the same way. The audacity of Raimondi's experiments (which quite dwarf the two string quartets by Milhaud which can be played together as an octet) have not served to keep his name before the public.

Concepts and messages ultimately count for so little in comparison to the quality of the music itself.