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"Waiting for the Barbarians" is an opera composed by Philip Glass on a libretto by Christopher Hampton and based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee. This project has been on the back burner for a long time; Glass first contacted Coetzee about adapting his book in 1991 and outlined a treatment of it that year, but the finished product wasn't delivered until 2005. This is a recording of the premiere, held September 10 of that year at the Theatre Erfurt in Germany; in a way, it is appropriate that this work should be heard in Germany first, as it bears a kinship with the kind of ruthless efficiency that typifies Weimar-era German works such as Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Der Jasager." However, its story is set in South Africa, where a local official in a small town finds himself at a moral crossroads as an invading, governmental military unit conducts a series of torturous interrogations as a prelude to a tactical strike against a locally based tribe. Glass must pick his projects with a sixth sense of sagacity, as such a story is strikingly timely in the United States in 2008, the year of the recording's release, with the U.S. government having come under fire for attempting to sidestep international conventions on torture through a cleverly bureaucratic redefinition of the term "torture."

"Waiting for the Barbarians" is highly effective in a dramatic sense, aided by an excellent libretto and vocal writing that is as close to conversation as melody is willing to allow. Like "Les Enfants Terribles" (1992), "Waiting for the Barbarians" represents a step forward for Glass in his treatment of dramatic subjects; in his early operas, there is such consistency of style that one might tend to view them as part of an aesthetic continuum. The basic components of this style are so strong that it doesn't compromise the subjects of Glass' early theater works, although Glass only chooses properties that mean a great deal to him, so any sense of uniformity across several projects -- indeed, if it truly existed as such -- was fated to dissolve over time. While the music here is unmistakably within Glass' strongest idiom, the orchestration is greatly varied, and the mood consistently married to the progression of the tragic story as it unfolds. He avoids typical operatic devices such as leitmotivs and set piece arias and recitatives; individual voices come out from the orchestration to underscore actions and emotions in the narrative with clarity, immediacy, and concision. "Waiting for the Barbarians" is as close to a play, or even an illustrated novel, as an opera can get, and Glass' approach helps convey a subtext, which in part as Glass states, is that "opera can become an occasion for dialogue about political crisis."

The recording is live, and the ambiance tends to swallow the voices a bit, but not by much; certainly the major difference between this Orange Mountain Music release and a typical Nonesuch recording of a Glass opera -- back when such recordings were regularly produced -- would be that the voices would have a bit more presence in the Nonesuch. This recording is so well made that it doesn't make much of a difference, and one gets used to the ambiance, which is similar to what one would hear in the opera house anyway. For a major label to make an opera recording like this ultimately involved such high overhead that it seemed hardly worth the effort even if it sold well; coming through Glass' own label, this is in every way satisfactory in communicating this major Glass effort, one that rightly he should be very proud of as it's a real achievement. Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

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