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
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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