Gosh, it seems that for the past couple years London has been a ridiculous hot bed for the music of Philip Glass. There were a couple particularly intense periods when Satyagraha was going on at the ENO, Marin Alsop was conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Barbican Centre was also getting into it by producing things like Waiting for the Barbarians in concert, whilst the Smith Quartet and the 21C Choir was jumping into the mix too. Lest we also forget last summer's all-Glass Proms concert.
But again, this season has been a big one. Not only did the ENO revive Satyagraha which they said was the most successful contemporary opera they had ever done, but the LPO made a particular investment in Glass music this year by programming not just the Violin Concerto No.1 (which they just did tonight with Robert McDuffie), but also commissioning Violin Concerto No.2 "The American Four Seasons," and then this weekend they'll be the orchestra for the European premiere of ICARUS: At the Edge of Time.
While I don't see Glass on their program next year, we can hope that 2010-11 is just a quite lull before the big season of 2011-12, which is Philip Glass' 75th birthday year.
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I attended the complete sell out performance tonight at The Royal Festival Hall. The Violin Concerto was good but having heard it now several times live frankly it was not as good as the perfomance last year at The Royal Albert Hall in my humble opinion. The second part of the evening was the world premier of SYMPHONY by Ravi Shankar, long time friend of Philip Glass. Mr Shankar arrived just before the evenings performance unannounced and withing a few seconds the entire house was standing and cheering. Ironically he sat in front of me! A music legend! His daughter Anoushka played the sitar and at the end of the evening everyone was standing. All in all a great evening with some world class music! I will be back at the The Royal Festival Hall on Saturday night for ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME….I cant wait! London and the UK in general is certainly lucky when it comes to GLASS