Nicolas Horvath - Philip Glass: Glassworlds Vol. 3, Metamorphosis (2016)

Artist: Nicolas Horvath
Title Of Album: Philip Glass: Glassworlds Vol. 3, Metamorphosis
Year Of Release: 2016
Label (Catalog#): Grand Piano [GP691]
Country: France/USA
Genre: Classical, Minimalism
Quality: FLAC (image+.cue+.log,scans)
Bitrate: Lossless
Time: 01:17:01
Full Size: 281 MB



Review by David Denton:
For his third volume in the series, Glassworlds, Nicolas Horvath takes us on a reverse journey through the career of the American-born composer, Philip Glass. To make life easy, let us start at the beginning of his career with his Second Sonatina, composed in 1959 at the age of twenty-two, and before he graduated from New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Compressing three movements into something less than three minutes has the parentage of Webern. Then a significant jump to 1968—by which time he had spent three years in Paris with the pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger, as his guiding light—and he had now totally embraced Minimalism in the 1968 score, Two Pages. The repetitive nature of the work takes minimalism one giant step too far in a work lasting almost thirteen minutes. Thankfully for the sanity of the world, by the time he wrote his opera, Einstein on the Beach, he had lived through that era, an interlude from the opera later forming the first part of the Trilogy Sonata. Now he had broken out of a rhythmic straightjacket and had taken on a warm and richly coloured tonal palette even in this version for solo piano. Then taking a stride towards Steve Reich’s unusual minimalist time-patterns we have the brief A Secret Solo from 1977, which was seemingly a bridging period to the opera Satyagraha, which together with an extract from Akhnaten, provided the remaining parts of Trilogy Sonata. The Olympian—Lighting of the Torch and Closing for the Los Angeles Olympic Games, leads to the four Metamorphosis, and finds Glass in a new melodic world of gentle sounds. Not all of the disc was originally intended for the piano, and many tracks sound that way, though the Glass specialist, Nicolas Horvath, is always a potent advocate.

Tracklist:

01. Metamorphosis I (07:16)
02. Metamorphosis II (07:17)
03. Metamorphosis III (03:26)
04. Metamorphosis IV (09:57)
05. Metamorphosis V (06:05)

06. The Olympian - Lighting of the Torch and Closing (03:17)
07. Trilogy Sonata - III. Akhnaten, Act III, Scene 3: Dance (05:03)
08. The Late, Great Johnny Ace: Coda (02:04)
09. Trilogy Sonata - II. Satyagraha, Act III: Conclusion (08:38)
10. A Secret Solo (02:05)
11. Trilogy Sonata - I. Einstein on the Beach: Knee Play No.4 (06:08)
12. Two Pages (12:52)
13. Piano Sonatina No.2 (02:46)