Friday, July 20, 2007

Hate it or love it, Philip Glass's music, with its near-constant arpeggios, slowly evolving harmonies and repetitive structures, sounds like nothing else. Both haters and lovers showed up on Wednesday night when Glass played a rare solo piano concert at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, as part of the William Kapell International Piano Competition & Festival. While the concert had been sold out for months, empty seats still dotted the Gildenhorn Recital Hall and three people walked out while Glass was playing.

Glass proved to be a fine advocate for his piano pieces, playing those arpeggios cleanly, clearly delineating the harmonic movement and giving arresting emphasis to the chords that occasionally break the texture. While "Mad Rush" and the "Four Metamorphoses" hewed closely to Glass's prototypical style, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" included a touch of old-time hymnal harmony, and a selection of his "Etudes" featured one that yoked romantic figurations to the arpeggios and another driven by a hilarious, demented cheerfulness.

For some, Glass's works are just the same nothing happening over and over and over again, until you want to pull your hair out. But if you can accept that Glass's music doesn't work like, say, a Beethoven sonata, the relative dearth of harmonic motion makes each change, however small, feel significant. The arpeggiation creates constellations of sound that are both lushly expansive and powerfully simple. And as the repetitions of these simple materials pile up, you eventually feel that this music doesn't really begin or end -- it's just a piece of something that's always been there. The result on Wednesday was a glimpse of eternity through Glass -- at least for those who could see it.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone