Glass: Einstein On The Beach

1	Einstein on the Beach, opera / Ronald Roxbury 2:44:52

Barnes & Noble

In November of 1976, composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson presented Einstein on the Beach at the venerable Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Their brave new opera held most of the audience entranced for more than five hours while the rest ran for the exits. Glass didn't exactly become a celebrity overnight -- the day after the performance, he went back to his job driving a taxi -- but Einstein got people talking about Glass's high voltage, highly repetitive, hypnotic music. Experiencing Einstein in an opera house is an extraordinary experience; the music perfectly complements Wilson's stylishly stylized stage direction. Even on a recording, minus its visual component, the pulsating energy of electric keyboards and amplified wind instruments joined to the enigmatic eloquence of the text (partly sung, partly spoken) makes Einstein exhilarating. While the premiere recording -- still available on Sony -- is raw and powerful, some of the repetitions had to be cut, as the original release was designed for LPs. Nonesuch's superb 1993 recording, however, offers the complete score in a more polished performance. Andrew Farach-Colton

All Music Guide

This opera, composed in 1975 and premiered in 1976, is scored for four principal actors, 12 singers doubling as dancers and actors, a solo violinist, and an amplified ensemble of keyboards, winds and voices. It is imbued with the postmodern spirit both in its non-linear, poetic, mystic narrative and the floating, eternal world created by the shifting, mathematically precise patterns of Philip Glass' modal music. There are three primary visual sets linked to three musical themes that recur within the work: trains (recalling the metaphors Einstein used to illustrate the theory of relativity, and with which he played as a child), a trial setting (modern life and modern science examined), and a spaceship (a metaphor for transcendence, and/or an escape from nuclear disaster). Also, Einstein himself appears midway between the orchestra and the stage as a violinist (his hobby) and as observer/witness. There are also additional spoken texts written by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs, which appear in various arrangements for single and multiple voices. This work locates itself as a midpoint between the composer's early-'70s work, linking rhythmic and harmonic structures and his later series of operas and vocal works and film scores employing expanded narrative and/or timbral experiments. [A German edition was issued in 2003.] "Blue" Gene Tyranny