This brilliantly devised CD from Gerard McChrystal is a deeply personal album; at times mystical, the music is always beautiful and captivating. Indeed 'Aria' has similar qualities to Jan Gabarek's 'Officium' (which sold 1.4 million copies) and will appeal to this fan-base. Featuring soprano and alto saxophone with a colourful array of different ensemble accompaniments — string orchestra, choir, guitar, piano, solo, string quartet and electronics. Baroque music blends seamlessly with contemporary; Handel resolves into Michael Nyman, Debussy's Syrinx morphs into Ravel's Piece en forme de habanera. All the tracks lead to the next by key or by starting and ending on the same note. Other works include Philip Glass Façades, Faure Les Berceaux, Bozza Aria, as well as original works by Billy Cowie, Karen Tanaka, Andy Scott and Michael McGlynn (from the vocal group Anúna who featured in Riverdance). Accompanying Gerard on this album are some of the UK's finest classical musicians including the Smith Quartet and the No. 1 best-selling classical artist, guitarist Craig Ogden. Gerard McChrystal is a multi-award winning saxophonist who has performed as a soloist in over 30 countries with many of the World's leading orchestras and ensembles.

The origins of Philip Glass' Voices, for didgeridoo and organ was specific: a commission from the city of Melbourne, Australia, in 2001. Yet the instrumental combination works so well that it seems almost foreordained, and Glass went on to write further music for the soloist here, Mark Atkins. In this performance, the didgeridoo and organ tracks were recorded separately, in Australia and upstate New York, respectively, and in Glass' metronomic world this works well enough. Yet one hopes that this release on Glass' Orange Mountain Music label is enough to spur future live performances with both players in the same room. The addition of the didgeridoo to the relatively homogeneous texture of Glass' organ writing is dramatic, but it doesn't disturb the basic shifting fields of the composer's music. It just deepens their color and variety in an immensely attractive way.

The piano may not be the ideal medium for capturing the expressive possibilities of Glass' style of minimalism, but pianist Bruce Brubaker selects pieces that work well on the instrument. Part of the problem with hearing Glass on the piano is forgetting the sound of his ensemble, and the variety of colors (and volume) they have imparted to similar music. Brubaker begins his recital of works by Glass and Alvin Curran with his transcription of "Knee Play 4" from Einstein on the Beach. It is in fact a lovely piece on the piano if one can put the spectacular power and tonal range of the instrumental version out of one's mind. "Opening" from Glassworks, originally scored for piano, works beautifully on the instrument, and flows as naturally as the C major Prelude from Book I of The Well Tempered Clavier. The two pieces by Curran, Hope Street Tunnel Blues III and Inner Cities II, use a syntax similar to Glass, with a more dissonant tonal vocabulary. Hope Street Tunnel Blues III has ample kinetic energy that gives it an exhilarating momentum.

There's perhaps a touch of irony in the title of Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen's box set Minimal Piano Collection because at nine discs, it's a pretty massive collection. The program booklet notes that he recorded the entire set, which includes more than ten hours of music, in only six days, an astounding feat. In the program notes, van Veen offers a remarkably clear and concise history of minimalism in music. He defines it broadly enough (following the lead of composer and critic Tom Johnson) to include works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Satie. Philip Glass is the composer most widely represented, with three of the set's nine CDs devoted to his music originally for piano, as well as transcriptions from his film scores and operas. Two discs are given to van Veen's mammoth 24 Préludes, organized according to the framework of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Other composers range from the very well known, such as Michael Nyman, John Adams, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage, to the familiar-to-specialists, like Tom Johnson, Wim Mertens, and Jacob ter Veldhuis, to those little-known to American audiences, like Klaas de Vries, Simeon ten Holt, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, and Carlos Micháns.

American new-music sextet eighth blackbird, which won Grammy Awards for each of its last three Cedille Records albums, continues to connect with genre-spanning, cutting-edge composers on FILAMENT, a CD of world-premiere recordings of works by Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Son Lux, plus a Philip Glass classic. The ensemble’s album, FILAMENT, was produced by Dessner, a Brooklyn-based composer, guitarist, and member of the Grammy-nominated, Billboard-charting indie rock band The National. Premieres include Dessner’s Murder Ballades and Muhly’s Doublespeak, both written for eighth blackbird, and Son Lux’s To Love and This is my Line, a remix created from the album’s other tracks. Dessner, on guitar, and Muhly, on organ, join eighth blackbird for a live-in-concert recording of Glass’s mesmerizing Two Pages at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The album’s title, FILAMENT, is a metaphor for the fiber of friendship, collaboration, and mutual influence connecting the composers and performers on the album.

It’s often said that the distilled essence of composers can be heard in their string quartets. And so it is with Glass, whose quartets here show a craftsman of considerable invention. String Quartet No. 6 begins as a bustling burst of dense energy, its second movement beautifully meandering, rich, and complex. The single-movement String Quartet No. 7 is almost Beethovenian in its restless questioning. Arranged for string quartet (with two violas), the Saxophone Quartet is warmly scored and yet shows Glass at his most forensic, with each bar stunningly sculpted.

This limited edition presents three outstanding albums by Víkingur Ólafsson in a box set including additional fan content and deluxe packaging. With three albums on Deutsche Grammophon so far Ólafsson is known as one of the most exciting pianists of today and widely acknowledged for his “individuality of spirit and intelligence of execution” (Limelight Magazine).

Of four living composers here, one is less well known. Like the Borusan Quartet itself, Hasan Uçarsu (born 1965) is Turkish. His String Quartet No 2 “The Untold” consists of two short, pensive outer movements – called epilogue and prologue – and two questing, energetic central movements full of Anatolian folk inspiration. Arvo Pärt’s Summa is a string version of a meditative vocal piece from 1977. Pēteris Vasks, like Pärt, found his own spiritual voice within or despite the restrictive Soviet aesthetic, as witnessed in his poignant String Quartet No 4. Philip Glass, in contrast, wrote his Quartet No 2, robustly minimalist, as stage music for an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novel Company. A fascinating, engagingly played quartet of quartets.

Orange Mountain is proud to announce the release of the world premiere recording of LIFE - A Journey Through Time with The Hague Philharmonic under the direction of Carolyn Kuan. Commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and conceived of by nature photographer Frans Lanting, LIFE: A Journey Through Time is a multimedia experience with images by Lanting and music by Philip Glass that showcases the wonders of the natural world. The hour-long score is cast in seven movements and was drawn from previously existing music in the Glass catalogue from a variety of sources, orchestrated for the first time by Michael Riesman. Since its premiere in 2006, LIFE has been performed dozens of times including in an abbreviated version, ORIGINS, at the inauguration of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland for an audience of international dignitaries.

An imaginative mixture of the popular and the unusual. Barber’s only quartet has at its heart the famous Adagio for Strings: the latter is an arrangement of the second of the quartet’s two movements. That Adagio – which here benefits not only from the unfamiliarity of the chamber original but also from the Duke’s sensitively understated approach on their first recording for Collins Classics – is here surrounded by some captivating faster music (including a brief return to the opening Molto allegro’s ideas). And Robert Maycock’s excellent booklet notes hint at what those famous seven minutes of slow, sad passion in particular could really be said to be about: young homosexual love in the Austrian woods. Thirty years later, in 1966, another American in Europe, and still in his twenties, wrote his first string quartet, though it’s unlikely to be a direct reflection of love, this time in Paris.

'The Concerto Project Vol. III' is the penultimate release in a series of four albums to be issued by Orange Mountain Music documenting the eight Philip Glass concertos to date. Volume III includes Glass's 'Concerto Grosso' commissioned by the City of Bonn for the opening of the Stadtische Kunstmuseum in the German city in 1992. Each movement of the Concerto Grosso is written for a distinctive group of instruments - the winds, brass and strings, which together make up a symphonic ensemble. In this live 1993 recording it is played by the Beethoven Orchester Bonn conducted by long-time Glass associate Dennis Russell Davies, the musicians who premiered the work - under its original title of Concerto for Three Ensembles - in June 1992. The second concerto is Glass's 'Concerto for Saxophone Quartet', performed by its dedicatees, the internationally renowned Raschèr Saxophone Quartet who premiered the piece at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in 1995.

Philip on Film: Filmworks by Philip Glass Review by Richard S. Ginell
In conjunction with a fall 2001 touring film festival, in which the Philip Glass Ensemble played the composer's scores live in sync with the films, Nonesuch released this handy, compact five-disc retrospective of Glass' prolific output for the cinema. Perhaps subliminally aware that Glass' large film catalog is wildly uneven in quality, producers and longtime associates Kurt Munkacsi and Michael Riesman have chosen wisely and well, generally giving the best scores complete or nearly complete attention on the first four discs and saving the fifth disc for excerpts from others, as well as a few unreleased new works for the faithful. Of all of Glass' cinematic collaborators, director Godfrey Reggio seems to have brought out the best in this composer.

Orange Mountain Music is proud to release the new album Aguas da Amazonia in a new orchestral version. In the 1990s Philip Glass composed a ballet for the Brazilian Grupo Corpo titled “Seven or Eight Pieces for a Ballet.” That music was picked up by the famous percussion group UAKTI and later recorded for the album Aguas da Amazonia. Aguas da Amazonia became the launching point and inspiration for arranger Charles Coleman who worked with conductor Kristjan Jarvi on adapting Glass’ music for large symphony orchestra. This new recording captures Coleman's orchestration in all its majesty showcasing the inherent symphonic possibilities.The performance showcases the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra under Kristjan Jarvi as well as the dynamic Absolute Ensemble.

30 years after Philip Glass’ debut record the new music ensemble Signal asked Philip Glass Ensemble music director Michael Riesman to arrange the classic album “Glassworks” for live performance. The concert took place at the New York venue, Poisson Lubman in April 2010. This CD features a new recording of the entire score, paired with a riveting performance of “Music in Similar Motion”.

An album the majority of whose contents consists of harp arrangements of music by Philip Glass might seem a bit arcane for a major label, but it seems that Sony knows what it is doing here. The Glass Effect double album is one of those releases that succeed on two different levels, an explicit one and one that, although not mentioned, is perhaps even more important. The former level here is the one denoted by the title, as Meijer picks up the rather neglected theme of Philip Glass' influence by offering, on disc two, a group of works by younger composers who follow Glass in varying degrees but who, it's safe to say, wouldn't have the styles they do without Glass having gone before. Much of the album consists of arrangements by Meijer herself, and these include, at the end, a remix of music from Koyaanisqatsi that's delightful and would be spoiled by description. But there's also solo harp music: sample the Suite for Harp by progressive rock musician Bryce Dessner, who certainly seems to have absorbed Glass' style far enough to make it his own.