Glass Essentials: An 80th Anniversary Tribute (LP)

This compilation celebrates Philip Glass's 80th birthday through his unique contribution to the solo piano repertoire. It features a selection of the intricately melodic Etudes which are both technique-expanding and intimately personal statements. Glass' importance as a film composer is shown in two excerpts from the BAFTA-winning score for The Hours, and Metamorphosis Two which derives from music for the 1988 film The Thin Blue Line. The only transcription Glass is known to have made, of Paul Simon's The Sound of Silence, is heard in its only recording. Music in Fifths - which Steve Reich called "like a freight train" - dates from his experimental years and is full of a mesmerising variety of pulse patterns.