Philip Glass Concert Review

A full house at London's Barbican awaits the 11 players of the Philip Glass Ensemble for the first night of the five for the "Philip on Film" season. The ensemble consists of keyboards, woodwind, percussion and vocals -- no live strings all week. Glass sits at his keyboard to the right of musical director, conductor and keyboard player Michael Reisman, Glass' long-term musical associate. The films are projected on the screen behind and above the ensemble. Expectations are high for the first night. Five short films directed by people Glass has chosen to work with. A reversal of the director-driven process of choosing music for film and Glass, by his own admission, prefers to work with independent directors when he can.

First up is Peter Greenaway's Man in a Bath, a seven-minute film examining the notion of bodies in water. Exquisite water photography is cut in with shots of showroom dummies together with images of calligraphy. All very neat and well calculated. The music's focus is on bold, clattering rhythms driven by arpeggiated piano and operatic soprano work. It's helped along by an assortment of delicate live percussion. Iranian Film Director Shirin Neshet's Passage chronicles a desert funeral burial and procession. The brilliant color of the film is matched by piano basslines and simple, playful woodwind melodies. It is only with the arrival of Godfrey (former monk and director of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi) Reggio's Evidence that the space between music and film successfully brings something new. The film is an outstanding series of children's portraits. Their expressions are disturbingly haunting with the music genuinely offsetting the images to create a new space for the viewer to dwell in. The familiar slow rhythmic string patterns define the unease. Anima Mundi is Reggio's other film contribution to the night. (The film was created in 1992 for The World Wildlife Fund.) Again, the synchronization between music and film creates its own unique dialogue and it is the music that defines the emotion of the breathtaking nature footage.

Jean Cocteau's 1946 La belle et La Babe takes up the whole of the second evening of the season and sees a much happier and more comfortable ensemble mood. Cocteau's fairy tale setting is based on a story written by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. Shot in medieval costumes, it shows Josette Day in a Cinderella part falling in love with a monster who turns into prince charming upon death. Cocteau created magical scenes in the enchanted castle. As a film composer, the challenge for Glass was to replace the original soundtrack and in his new score to synchronize live singers to perform the dialogue. The central metaphor of the fairy tale as the life of an artist is played out with operatic grandeur. The overture sets the scene with threatening bass drones and an almost comical fairground organ refrain before the arrival of the soprano and tenor. Glass only just gets away with it before his rhythmic pulses take over to establish mood. And it really works as the new score washes into its own space and breaths life into a film packed full of genuinely thrilling and original special FX Cocteau used to create his fairy tale atmospheres. The marriage of new music and old film works well.

And so to the third night and the return of Godfrey Reggio for the screening and concert of the second installment of his Qatsi trilogy, Powaqqatsi. Released in 1988, the image and music based film explores life on earth, focusing on the negative transformation of land based, human scale societies into technology-driven, urban clones. In particular the images concentrate on the impact of the global expansion of technology on the third World. For the first time in the concert series Glass hits the audience with a huge epic theme and the Ensemble respond with great grace and favor to the slow building anthem. Suddenly, all is well in the Glass camp and a true picture of a great modern composer emerges under the giant screen. If the film seems to lack an editorial vision it makes up for it with acute devotion to observation and detail. Much of the sonic interest comes from the live and keyboard ethnic percussion work and exploration of the main melodic theme.

For his album re score of Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, one of the early talkies, Glass wrote a score for The Kronos Quartet. As far removed from a horror genre as he could get. No string quartet at the Barbican, rather, a reworked version based around a reduced ensemble of five. Piano, organ, saxophone and clarinet conjure up an offset mood for Dracula's castle and Bela Lugosi's stylized lead role. In the end the music serves to smooth over the passage of time and sustain an even tempo but adds surprisingly little to the film. For the most part the two seem divorced.

The five nights come to a close with a full ensemble line up for Reggio's 1983 Koyaanisqatsi. The first in the Qatsi trilogy, a provocative look at the complexities of America in the late-20th century. Like all three films, there is no plot, no actors and no dialogue except that between the viewer and film. The film's role is to provoke and to raise questions. On an international level it opened up Glass' musical style. His arpeggio-based musical sequences and his offset emotional style. Twenty years after its release Koyaanisqatsi remains one of modern cinemas most relevant and enduring masterpieces. Its political focus is sharp and accurate. Hyper-observant of a mad out-of-balance-society, the film dashes from serene landscape shots to balletic aircraft sequences and hyper busy circuit board factory design. In his music, Glass again defines a new space within which the audience can absorb the film. The driving organ and brass rhythms create their own hyper rhythms of color, harmony and discord.

After five concerts, Glass and his ensemble have once again endeared themselves to a London audience. An audience that at the start of 2003 seems hungry for new models and new ways of consuming modern music. An audience keen to stretch the boundaries of definition, time and place, increasingly aware that they themselves can complete the meaning in art. Perhaps it is fitting that they can go back 20 years and experience Koyaanisqatsi to get a taste for where that new direction begun to take root.  -- Simon Duff
 
 

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