I first got interested in Glass last year when I saw the Metropolitan Opera’s (1979) in a London cinema. I had gone because of my interest in Gandhi: the opera, whose title means “Truth-Force”, presents scenes from his life in South Africa. What I hadn’t realised was that although there is a character called Gandhi who does Gandhi-like things (protesting against racist laws, leading demonstrations) there is no clear narrative. Instead the Gujarati lawyer sings prayers from the Bhagavad-Gita in untranslated Sanskrit, while acrobats and puppets present the story.
I’ll admit I was confused at first – and I wasn’t the only one. During the show’s interval the presenter Eric Owens – Alberich in the Met’s current Ring Cycle – explained to frustrated viewers that the lack of subtitles was a deliberate artistic choice. Glass, who describes himself as a “Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist”, worked with Ravi Shankar in the Sixties and has a keen interest in mantras and meditation. Satyagraha’s is supposed to send you into a kind of trance. It's perfect for when you need some time to think, or indeed not think. Glass dislikes the word minimalist but the orchestra is undeniably, well, minimal and the music has an appealing cleanness.
Einstein On The Beach Philip Glass Rar Extractor Download
Einstein On The Beach Performances 2019
Among other films Glass has written scores to The Truman Show and Notes on a Scandal and his style is much imitated. Anyone, like me, born in 1981 has absorbed his musical grammar without realising.By its nature Einstein is patchy. Though the choreography and dance pieces were excellent the two central trial scenes, I’m afraid, left me cold.
(I have no idea who was on trial or why.) The performance wasn’t helped by the Barbican policy of allowing people to leave and return to the theatre whenever they wanted. Five hours is a long time and I sympathise with anyone needing a toilet break. Then again some people left literally 45 minutes in, coming back with drinks and crisps. Sorry to be po-faced but the piece only works by concentrated accumulation. Having to stand up every two minutes breaks the spell. There was also an enforced 15-minute interval for technical reasons (we were denied some flying acrobats in the final hour) that disturbed the flow.Amid these irritations one scene around the fourth hour stood out.
The stage went black save for a bar of light resting horizontally on stage, looking like the dividing line of a fraction or a minus sign. Slowly the left edge was lifted until the bar was moving round like a clock hand.
Eventually it was vertical and then raised up inch by inch. The shining bar evoked a whole range of associations: a carbon rod being raised from a nuclear reactor; ’s zip paintings; Pozzo in Waiting for Godot (“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more”); a spaceship leaving Earth.Many people find this kind of thing and too abstract. (I overheard someone saying it felt like being in a Seventies Woody Allen film.) Yet I found the problem with Einstein was it was not abstract enough: cringe-worthy poetry mocked all-American values, and the final monologue was a sentimental paean to love. It was the opera’s starkest image that was the strongest.