Philip Glass: The Symphonies
Various Artists
Philip Glass and his longtime collaborator Dennis Russell Davies offer in this collection an immersive, elegant survey of 10 of the composer’s symphonies. As mysterious as they are sanguine, these works evoke romantic and ominous imagery, engaging one’s feelings about modern life. The Third Symphony’s chord structures and syncopated rhythms toe the line between stability and uneasiness, while the choral Fifth Symphony takes up existential questions, drawing its libretto from a wide range of historical texts from the Bible to the Quran.