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Symphony No. 2

Philip Glass' second symphony gets off to a sombre and somewhat austere start. The first movement is mostly slow, stately, with muted colours. Its rising and falling passages put me in mind of being on board ship in a slight swell. In the second movement, a solemn beginning gives way to more urgent music, redolent for me of apprehension & anxiety. The busily pulsing third (and concluding) movement doesn't feel cut from quite the same cloth as the preceding two, and it's my least favourite part of the piece, though ny no means an outright let-down. Overall it's still a work I greatly enjoy.


The brief interlude excerpted from the chamber opera Orphée that follows the symphony on this CD is a delight, a most beguiling two and a half minutes of music (not six and a half, as the booklet notes claim). That, in turn, is followed by the 1995 'Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra': not a composition which has firmly lodged in my memory, but when I listened to it anew yesterday it did come back to me, and I was delighted by that too. It rounds out a thoroughly satisfying and well-filled disc - which makes a sharp contrast with the ungenerous servings on some of Glass's more recent recordings on his 'official' Orange Mountain Music label.

I bought this in 1998 in Cardiff, where I was then ostensibly based, though frequently working elsewhere. Sunday afternoons I often took a leisurely look around the Waterstone's bookshop and the MVC record shop on The Hayes, this being one of several albums of works by the American minimalist composers I discovered at the latter, a sadly short-lived emporium.

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