The 20 etudes of
Philip Glass, composed between 1994 and 2013, were not a single set. They fall into two books of ten, with subgroupings within each arising at different times in response to a variety of commissions. Yet they work well as a set, with the harmonic language, as in
Glass' compositions in other media, expanding as his career developed; the middle of the second set provides a sort of climax, and the final etude of the set is the longest one and the one with the most explicit goal of transcendence. Their musical language is not fundamentally different from that of
Glass in general, but it is concentrated as a piano will do. Recordings of
Glass' music on his own
Orange Mountain Music label are generally of high quality, but pianist
Maki Namekawa achieves unusually idiomatic
Glass readings here: this music requires the sort of clarity that brings out the polyphony in the composer's music and the play of overtones and sonorities that evolves from it, and that's just what you get from
Namekawa.
Glass himself has recorded some of these works, but this is one of those cases where a specialist achieves better results than the composer. Recommended for those curious about
Glass and the piano, or even for those looking for a concise introduction to the composer's later style. ~ James Manheim
