Commentary: There's no escaping Philip Glass and his piano etudes right now
LOS ANGELES — In 1994, Philip Glass wrote six seemingly ordinary piano etudes for conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies on the occasion of his 50th birthday. Glass also wrote them for himself. Etudes are traditionally studies in technique, and here they're an ever-pragmatic composer's exercises to improve his own playing.
Davies gave the premiere in Bonn, Germany, in 1994 and soon after played them at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. They seemed then like both technical studies and compositional ones, focusing on this melodic cell or that propulsive rhythmic idea, meant to get the fingers going and the compositional juices flowing, but not much more than that.
With Glass, however, you never know where anything will wind up. He may start out in overly familiar territory, then through barely perceptible gradual changes the end point becomes an unexpected marvel. That the grain of the marvel was always there is sensed only in retrospect.
Something similar happened with the composition of the etudes themselves. Over's 2013 film "Visitors," a series of small portraits that, with the help of Glass' score, becomes a kind of cinematic transmigration of their souls.
