Philip Glass

Symphony No. 2

About this Album

Three new works by Philip Glass received their first recordings on this Nonesuch recording, all of them conducted by the composer’s long-time advocate Dennis Russell Davies. Symphony No. 2, performed here by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a study in polytonality. In his notes to the recording, Glass writes, “I’ve been interested in polytonal music for some time, starting with Akhnaten ... The great experiments of polytonality carried out in the 1930s and '40s show that there’s still a lot of work to be done in that area. Harmonic language and melodic language can coexist closely or at some calculated distance, and their relationship can be worked out in terms of either coexisting harmonies or ambiguous harmonies. We’re not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.” Symphony No. 2 was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was premiered on October 15, 1994.

The Concerto for Saxophone Quartet, surely one of the few such works of its kind, is a four-movement piece performed by the Raschèr Quartet and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, in which each movement features a different member of the quartet. The Raschèr Quartet has played the concerto with more than 30 European and American orchestras, making this piece one of Glass’s most widely performed orchestral works. Originally composed for the Raschèr, this work received its premiere on July 27, 1995.

The “Orphée” interlude is drawn from the first opera of Glass’s Cocteau trilogy, which includes the composer’s popular La Belle et La Bête, and dates from 1993. This two-act chamber opera was commissioned by the American Repertory Theater in Boston and had its premiere on May 14, 1993. The instrumental section presented here accompanies Orphée’s return to his home from the world of the dead in Act II.