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Philip Glass doesn\u2019t turn 90 until the end of January. But the Glass year is already officially underway with two curiously enlightening projects this month. . <\/p>\n
Paris Opera has mounted a shocking new \u201cnoir\u201d production of Glass\u2019 luminous \u201cSatyagraha\u201d that the company is now streaming <\/a>(after a short delay thanks to a typical French strike) until May 24. It features a startling performance by Anthony Roth Costanzo that significantly elevates the American countertenor to the small ranks of one of the world\u2019s most important singers. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, UCSB Arts & Lectures commissioned \u201cPhilip Glass and the Poets,\u201d which was devoted to an overlooked but revealing aspect of what makes Glass great: his attachment to a repetitive, wandering muisical style that may not seem to go anywhere but that creates an atmosphere where anything and everything can happen.. Its premiere was Sunday night at Campbell Hall featuring readings by performance artist Taylor Mac, in flamboyant drag, and unflustered dancer\/choreographer Lucinda Childs.<\/p>\n In both cases, these events focus on the operation of music and text. Glass has written a significant quantity of pure music for a vast range of instrumental forces from multiple genres and cultures. He may well hold a record for the breadth of his collaborations. Robert Wilson, Woody Allen, David Bowie, Ravi Shankar, Fody Musa Suso, Allen Ginsberg, Gustavo Dudamel, Jerome Robbins, Gidon Kremer, Martin Scorsese, Brian Eno, David Henry Hwang, Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama \u2014 the list goes on and on and on.<\/p>\n With Ginsberg, Glass acted as the straight man. He would begin a performance with Glass at the piano, bestowing an ingratiating quality of quiet pleasure on Ginsberg\u2019s flowery imagery. Gradually Ginsberg\u2019s text and manner would rise to one of arresting spiritual and sexual ecstasy, while Glass remained ever cool.<\/p>\n The effect was not, however, of Glass and Ginsberg in two different worlds, but of Glass giving Ginsberg the space for expansiveness, while giving listeners the permission to follow Ginsberg to unexpected extremes. <\/p>\n The UCSB event was elegant. The pianist was the composer Timo Andres, who is also one of the participants in a traveling Glass etudes show. Members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus joined in on two songs. It began with Childs, who was dancer, choreographer and reciter in Glass\u2019 \u201cEinstein on the Beach,\u201d sharing excerpts from that seminal Glass\/Wilson music theater masterpiece.<\/p>\n At 85, Childs has lately been elegantly staging opera (including another recent \u201cSatyagraha\u201d in France), reciting bits of \u201cEinstein\u201d text by Christopher Knowles. You listen to DJs on 1980s New York City radio; you shop in the supermarket; you feel the earth move \u2014 it\u2019s all one. Childs\u2019 exquisite intonation never falters. In a miraculous Einsteinian world, no word, no image, no emotion wants emphasis.<\/p>\n Ginsberg, who died almost 30 years ago, has been a hard act to follow. In 2019, Patti Smith<\/a> took on the challenge in this same auditorium, adding a new edge. Taylor Mac\u2019s approach was to employ a sense of irony to the best-known Glass\/Ginsberg collaboration, \u201cWichita Vortex Sutra.\u201d Irony has little use for ecstasy, but Mac\u2019s specialty is spectacle, and his slow, if showy, disposal of wit brought a new immersive quality to the text and performance.<\/p>\n Andres was the suave glue of the evening. He also performed Glass\u2019 solo etudes 13 and 16. Theater is in Glass\u2019 blood, and theater can inspire even his most untheatrical music, such as his set of 20 solo piano etudes that have in recent years become practically standard repertory. The 17th<\/sup> etude, however, happened to be inspired by a Ginsberg poem, \u201cMagic Psalm,\u201d movingly read by Mac, who also added a poem of his own, \u201cWhile Ginsberg Wept.\u201d <\/p>\n Glass, of course, set<\/i> much text to music, sometimes with little stress and other times with robust melodiousness, but in all cases the words came first. That robustness was his way with Leonard Cohen\u2019s \u201cMother Mother,\u201d and of \u201cFather Death\u2019s Blues,\u201d in which Ginsberg extols death as the world\u2019s greatest lover.<\/p>\n