I know what you’re thinking, and I agree - strange be fellows indeed!
Two works that intrigued me and caught me, but for very different reasons. Jenufa was an incredibly human experience, showing the great passions and emotions that can effect real life. Satygraha showed me monumental blocks of sound, big brush strokes and epic depiction. Neither description could be used for the other. The Philip Glass work, like many of his other stage works, wasn’t really a narrative work, but a series of tableaux’s exploring the idea of something or someone. There are occasional moments of direct interaction, with character or audience, but on the whole I feel that I’m witnessing an image with an incredibly elaborate musical accompaniment, Jenufa on the other hand gives me deep emotions, richness of intention and a yearning for characters to burst free for the day-to-day, to live and to breath in a free world.
You almost can’t get two more different composers; the master of Czech music and text setting and the almost enfant-terrible of 1970s NYC. Text to Janacek is paramount. Before watching Jenufa I didn’t know much of his music - the string quartet Razumovsky, Sinfonietta and some of the songs - but I did know that many colleagues of mine praised his music highly and if often mentioned to composers due to his text setting. I can’t speak or understand Czech, but you could hear the clarity in the crystalline, easy vocal lines of the piece. He creates beautiful and complex orchestral accompaniments that, like Strauss in a way, don’t get in the way of the singer, but enhances their line which is often almost counter to the music flowing from the orchestra. The lines sore in beautiful melody or are clear and direct in declamation, but never once did you feel the flow of the music stop of recitative. The flow and realness of the music was amazing - by that I mean the music didn’t feel contrived or to obvious. The command of the text setting was so superior it flowed with ease.
PG talking to kids about his music
Philip Glass is a composer I know very well. You can’t miss him. He’s style is almost pasé it’s so over done. I do think his music can be remarkable, and I am especially fond of Akhenaten and Einstein on the Beach. Those works form a trilogy with Satyagraha. However, I find the other two more successful pieces, due to the opposite reasons that Jenufa is successful, that is the way text is set and communicated to the audience. In Einstein the text that is sung are numbers, simple vowel sounds and shapes and oohs and ahhs. In Akhenaten the text comes from texts thought to be from the ancient Egyptian period and are sung in languages of those times - Hebrew, Akkadian and for the Hymn to the Sun, the language of the audience it it being shown. These works have a monumentality to them and the grand, slow and never changing pulse of Glass’ music suits these tableaux’s of energy (Einstein) and solemnity (Akhenaten). However, the character and life of Ghandi is what is behind the grandiose and mega music of Satyagraha, and it doesn’t have the same resonance as the other two works. There are references to ancient Indian texts and of course Glass has a firm understand of Indian musical ideas from his time with Ravi Shankar, but it doesn’t seem to jell like it does in the other two works. Einstein is just so odd and unexpected that it works for me, especially when you add the genius of Robert Wilson to it, who was such a driving force for the production. Akhenaten is so mysterious and solemn that if you get the tone right, which I think Glass does, you can basically get away with anything. Satyagraha on the other hand is missing something. It either needs to be more biopic or less, and personally I wanted more. It was written in between Einstein and Akhenaten, and I think the sort of grand tableaux meets grand processional music works well and is given some amazing experimental flair in Einstein, mostly because of what Robert Wilson does on stage and the craft of the slow progression, development and un winding of the music. These elements are fused into a more narrative driven work in Satyagraha. I don’t think they are as successful but and interesting experiments that form the ground work for success in Akhenaten. I enjoyed the music for Sat., but its not dramatically satisfying for me.
For anyone interested in some extra listening, listen to Glass’ first Violin Concerto, I think his best work.
“the point of writing music and experiencing music isn’t to make people comfortable necessarily”