Latest Release
- JAN 10, 2025
- 10 Songs
- Glass: Solo Piano · 1989
- Glassworks (Expanded Edition) · 1982
- Koyaanisqatsi (Complete Original Soundtrack) · 2009
- Glassworks (Expanded Edition) · 1982
- The Hours (Music from the Motion Picture) · 2002
- Philip Glass: Mishima (Bob's Burgers Arrangement) - Single · 2023
- Philip Glass Solo · 2024
- Koyaanisqatsi (Original Soundtrack) · 1983
- The Hours (Music from the Motion Picture) · 2002
- Tales from the Loop (Original Soundtrack) · 1989
Essential Albums
- The next entry in Dennis Russell Davies’ exploration of Philip Glass’ works sees two masterpieces—one by Glass, one by Bernstein—taken up by the esteemed violinist Renaud Capuçon. For the former composer’s 1987 concerto, Capuçon’s sharp, driving style is perfectly suited for the work’s elongated arpeggios and dramatic melodies.
- 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.
- After stretching the symphonic form in earlier works, Philip Glass returned to a more Romantic conceptual format with his eighth opus for orchestra. Its first movement introduces a series of darkly gorgeous themes that Glass braids into a rich contrapuntal finale. The neoclassical format suits him well and helps underscore his skill as a melodist. Dennis Russell Davies, the composer’s foremost symphonic interpreter, leads a performance full of rhythmic vitality. Glass’ string duos and Harpsichord Concerto round out this prime late-period program.
- There are repetitions aplenty here, naturally. But by the time Glass sat down to record these piano pieces, he’d already begun to stray beyond the hardcore tenets of minimalism that he had helped develop in the '70s. His experience with operatic writing is clear throughout: The gorgeously lyrical “Wichita Sutra Vortex” (whose namesake is an Allen Ginsberg poem) became a staple of the contemporary repertoire shortly after this album was issued. There are more metrically precise readings of “Metamorphosis” available, but the composer’s own slightly ramshackle technique has a charm that will never be topped.
- A founder of the minimalist school of composition, American composer Philip Glass was introduced to a wide variety of classical music by his father, who owned a record shop. He entered the Peabody Institute’s preparatory program as a flautist, before studying math and philosophy at the University of Chicago. After being exposed to the music of Anton Webern, Glass went on to complete keyboard studies at Juilliard as a contemporary of Steve Reich and won a Fulbright scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Composed in 1981 for his own Philip Glass Ensemble, Glassworks was intended as an accessible piece of music for the “Walkman generation” and was successfully marketed as such. This re-edition of the original recording features Glass talking about the piece and his process. Whether you’re already familiar with it or not, this is a great companion guide.
- 2025
- 2024
Artist Playlists
- The deceptively simple delights of an American original.
- Set your life to this gorgeously haunting soundtrack.
- The composer traces his musical autobiography with this handpicked playlist.
- The music that fuels the hungry imagination of a modern master.
- Explore the visionary composer’s broad impact in picks from some ardent disciples.
- 2025
- 2025
Appears On
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About Philip Glass
More than a pioneering minimalist composer, Philip Glass has long epitomized—and popularized—downtown New York’s spiritual-artistic bohemia. The self-described “Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist” was born in Baltimore in 1937. Glass avidly consumed the more avant classical releases he heard in his father’s record store, and went on to study composition at Juilliard and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After he formed the long-running Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968, his rigorous minimalist phase peaked in 1974 with Music in Twelve Parts, a four-hour work completed while he was still day-jobbing as a plumber and taxi driver. The first three of his more than two dozen operas—Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1983)—mythologized historical figures and became contemporary classics. Having evolved into a more flexible composer of “music with repetitive structures,” Glass wrote a dozen symphonies between 1992 and 2019, the most popular of which (No. 1, No. 3, and No. 12) are based on David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy of albums. Glass’s maximalist output also includes several string quartets and numerous solo works for piano and other keyboards. Plus, he has put his prolifically pulsing stamp on many movie soundtracks—including the Academy Award-nominated Kundun (1997) and Notes on a Scandal (2006)—in addition to works for dance and the stage.
- FROM
- Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
- BORN
- 1937
- GENRE
- Classical