Several years ago I saw Philip Glass’ opera Orphee at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooperstown, and neither the music nor the production has left my mind. The piece is slowly being discovered, I feel – it was written in 1992, and while it did not receive a warm reception from the critics, that has never stopped great works of art before (“No one ever erected a statue to a critic,” I think, is the Sibelius line). I’ve vowed to see the movie on which it is based, a Jean Cocteau film, as I did not understand the story at all, but I’ve yet to enter that peculiar phase of life where you watch all the movies you’ve always planned.
The opera has not yet been commercially recorded (a poor BBC recording exists with an almost inaudible orchestra, but I have it from a friend who worked on the Glimmerglass production; it is not commercially available), but Paul Barnes has done a series of transcriptions from the opera for piano. Barnes did a recording of these transcriptions, which is available on Philip Glass’ website. A performance of one of these is here. It sounds a fair amount like Michael Nyman’s score to the movie The Piano, though with a bit more rubato and a bit more emotion. Think of an inebriated Glenn Gould in love. But the resolutions are lush and romantic and Chopin-esque.
But this is merely a transcription – with vocal parts removed – of a few minutes of the opera. (Though it is its most lyrical theme.) You can imagine how much richer the experience is in operatic form, with these elements as the musical backdrop for a love duet. And since the opera is held together by a leitmotif structure, the themes you hear here are introduced earlier and developed later.
I am not familiar with the other operas of Philip Glass, but I advise people to look for them. The form is perfectly suited to his “minimalist” style: the repetitive structures offer an intelligible musical architecture over which to float a more open vocal line (consequently, he did not need to reduce his libretto to meter in order to make it work with his music). By the time he wrote Orphee he was also a master of the orchestra, something that cannot be said for all his earlier works. The orchestration is superb. (This transcription reveals the loveliness of the chord structure, but cannot have the emotional force of the original strings with flute descants).
When an artist spends his time transcribing from one form to another the work of another artist, you know there is life there (from the Greek story to Cocteau to Glass to Barnes). If you see this opera getting picked up by an opera house, look for a chance to see it.
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