When I
asked for a ticket for the Philip Glass concert the sales assistant said there
was no Philip Glass concert listed. I
said the one on 27 October and she said Oh, you mean the Lavinia Meijer
concert, as if referring to Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift. One of the things that
takes time when you move to another country is to get to know the cultural
icons and Lavinia Meijer is certainly one of those in the Netherlands.
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Her concert
at the beautiful Nieuwe Kerk in The
Hague brought together a different audience from other concerts I have heard
there. Apart from the smattering of children, aspiring young harpists brought
along by indulgent parents, there was a majority of chic or cool or fashion,
whatever you will, which underlined the pop status harpist Lavinia Meijer has
earned herself since graduating from Amsterdam Conservatoire.
Then there
were people like me who were drawn by the programme: the music of Philip Glass.
For most of us, the chances of hearing operas like Akhnaten and Einstein on the
beach are pretty slim, so this concert was a special treat, as it included the Attacca Ensemble a chamber choir who specialize in contemporary music,
conducted by the excellent Fokko Oldenhuis, a conductor who, as they used to
say, has the score in his head not his head in the score, and who brings a superb standard of ensemble,
intonation and expression from his singers. The group was completed by pianist/
artistic director Feico Deutekom and percussionist Christian Saris.
Of the
instrumental pieces, the high point for me was the moto perpetuo Music in
similar motion, from 1969, arranged here for piano and harp. The simplicity of
the melodic figures is gradually transformed by progressively increased rhythmic
complexity, and this was a virtuoso performance. A short piece from the
soundtrack for the film The Hours left me cold: here are the Glass hallmarks of
unprepared changes from major to minor and endless hemiolas that just become
irritating after a while. To be fair, the music was written for film rather
than stage and the enthusiastic applause showed that my reaction was not shared
by most of the audience.
The choral
pieces were in every way satisfying and effective. This choir has a superb tone
quality and tonal and dynamic range and this was heard to great effect in The
Funeral and The Temple from Akhnaten .
Chilling in every sense was the 1986 Freezing on a text by Suzanne Vega,
and Knee Play III gave us a hint of the humour and subtlety to be found in the
mammoth, difficult to produce Einstein on the beach. Hydrogen Jukebox is a
theatre piece from 1990 on texts by Allan Ginsberg. Here´s a fragment of The
Green Automobile:
Childhood youth time age and eternity
Would open like sweet trees
In the nights of another spring
And dumbfound us with love
For we can see together
The beauty of souls hidden like diamonds
In the clock of the world
In contrast there is the icy satire on American
politics from CIA Dope Calypso:worth finding for yourself to read the whole text, too long to quote here.
Philip Glass is often catalogued as a
minimalist composer. In his own bio, we
read, Glass
himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of
“music with repetitive structures.” This
is a much better description of his music. It was a great privilege to hear his
music played by these musicians who have the necessary skills to perform this
style and who have worked with the composer on several occasions in the
Netherlands.
In his 2010 biography of John Cage, Kenneth Silverman
writes that Cage knew Philip Glass and liked some of his music, but criticized both
Glass and Steve Reich for “arousing in their listeners a convivial feeling that
turned them into a group, like a pop music following “. There was a sense of a pop music following at
Lavinia Meijer´s concert and who is complaining? As far as I can see, any musician
who can get 500 people like myself to spend their cash on listening to music by
a living composer played at the highest standard deserves only admiration.
