Jubilee concert honors Glass and Pärt
Carnegie Hall hosted the best birthday party ever as the American Composers Orchestra presented the Philip Glass 75th Birthday Concert in the Isaac Stern Auditorium Jan. 31. Thousands of composers, musicians and music lovers broke into a roar when Glass was introduced, giving him no less than four curtain calls at concert’s end.
The American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world dedicated to promulgating the music of American composers. They commissioned Glass’ first orchestral work, as well as works by John Adams and Lukas Foss, among hundreds of others. For this concert, ACO conductor laureate Dennis Russell Davies paired Glass’ Symphony No. 9 (U.S. premiere) with Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate for orchestra and solo piano (New York premiere), brilliantly executed by Maki Namekawa.
Both Glass and Pärt have been dubbed “minimalist.” While both composers decry the term, they employ some of the same compositional tools. Both require the audience to tune into tiny modulations in order to grasp the music’s greater purpose; both employ non-Western modes; both employ repetition to signal its opposite: change.
Indeed, change itself is the event that happens in this music. It may or may not be beautiful, but it is significant. Musical resolution is not considered the inevitable outcome, it’s just one more change, which appears in two guises: a shift, often abrupt and without closure, from one pattern to the next or a shift within a pattern. More subtle, the second has greater effect.
There are obvious differences between the two composers. Pärt abandoned avant-garde techniques to study Gregorian chant and medieval polyphony before emerging with his own haunting, otherworldly voice. He composed Lamentate after seeing Anish Kapoor’s statue “Marsyas,” which captured for him the myth’s tragic element: No one can escape death and suffering.
When Lamentate begins, you feel something great happening somewhere in the world. As it draws to a close, you’re sharing the human experience of the world’s end. What is remarkable is that Pärt tunes you into the infinite with the sparest of sounds, the most delicate juxtapositions.
Glass collaborated with poet Allen Ginsberg, pop icon David Bowie and theater iconoclast Robert Wilson. His ninth symphony, which he describes as “big and unrelenting,” is full of syncopated rhythms, a fortified horn section and a second movement that begins with the lyric simplicity of a pop love song. Not quite “Happy Birthday to You,” but close enough to make for a very happy evening.
