Philip Glass Ensemble News
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2024-04-23
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2024-03-16 09:57:00
From Early Music to contemporary: the Royal Festival Hall organ is 70 and organist James McVinnie is celebrating with a Southbank Centre residency
[…] has always been a big fan of Glass's music, particularly that from the 1960s and 1970s. He is one of those who saw Einstein on the Beach in London in 2021 and it changed his life. Another work that he found powerful was Glass' Music in Twelve Parts, written between 1971 and 1974. Something of a cult piece, the work had never been published and so had never been performed by anyone other than the Philip Glass Ensemble. James wrote to Philip Glass to ask if he could put together a performance for Glass's 80th birthday. The result was a performance by a group of musicians assembled by James at the Barbican on 1 May 2017. It was a unique opportunity and the genesis of his ensemble. He did not do anything further with the ensemble until after the pandemic when he launched it more seriously, performing music by Glass, […]
2023-09-14 06:51:00
In celebratory mood, the Cambridge Music Festival notches up its 30th anniversary this year. East Anglian music writer, Tony Cooper, reports.
[…] harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, the Takács String Quartet and Chineke! Chamber Ensemble as well as two Cambridge institutions - the Choir of King's College Cambridge and the Academy of Ancient Music. Founded in 1991, the current director of the Cambridge Music Festival, Justin Lee, has been in post since 2012 and under his leadership, the festival has featured an array of leading artists ranging from Murray Perahia to Nigel Kennedy and from the Philip Glass Ensemble to the Borodin String Quartet in orchestral, choral and chamber-music concerts running alongside a well-planned programme of education and community events. As the Cambridge Music Festival receives no public subsidy or Arts Council support whatsoever, a generous and dedicated core of sponsors and individual donors regularly come to the rescue by providing at least 70 per cent of the festival's income. This feat alone needs to be loudly applauded. […]
2021-10-22 11:36:17
Royal Festival Hall, LondonReplacing a live-accompanied screening of Koyaanisqatsi, this programme was intoxicating, thrilling and clearly exhausting to perform If the repeated melodic licks and ultra-static harmonies of Philip Glass’s minimalism aren’t your thing, look away now. Replacing a live-accompanied screening of Koyaanisqatsi (the non-narrative film built around Glass’s score) after the Philip Glass Ensemble pulled out due to the pandemic, this programme remained an intensive plunge into the composer’s musical language. In three works drawn from the past 40 years, the continuities were unmissable: single chords sustained or hammered out or looped as arpeggios; sudden, thrilling changes of volume or orchestration; rhythmic drive supercharged by the occasional “missing” beat. Now standard features of film soundtracks, such gestures have lost their power to shock. Yet Glass’s music can still be intoxicating, even mesmerising, in live performance – which is presumably why this concert was listed as sold out.
2021-09-01 09:04:01
Finns to the fore: the Philharmonia's new season showcases new principal conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, and featured artist, violinist Pekka Kuusisto
[…] season and he reappears as soloist in Sibelius' Violin Concerto, music by Vivaldi (guess what) and conducting the premiere of a new piece by Isobel Waller-Bridge, as well as curating the Philharmonia's Music of Today series with works by Gabriella Smith, John Luther Adams and Anna Thorvaldsdottír. Philip Glass' film environmental film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance will be screened in the Royal Festival Hall with the score played live with conductor Michael Riesman, Synergy Vocals and the Philip Glass Ensemble. The film is part of the orchestra's Human / Nature: Music for a Precious Planet series which looks at how composers across the centuries have responded to the natural world, and exploring the ways today's composers are addressing the global climate crisis. Other new works in the season include the premieres of Gabriel Jackson's The Promise and Richard Blackford's Vision of a Garden performed as part of conductor David Hill's concert with the Bach Choir, Fauré’s Requiem: […]
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