Glass blends familiar, innovative
Glass may work with a smaller box of Legos than most composers, but his building projects are still endlessly varied and often riveting.
Philip Glass’ music is rarely without new ideas and directions, but you do often have to recalibrate your concept of novelty. For more than half a century, Glass has made a habit of pulling and prodding at a small musical lexicon, creating art by applying minor variations and recombinations to the same core repertoire.
His Piano Concerto No. 3, which the New Century Chamber Orchestra introduced to the Bay Area in a series of concerts with soloist Simone Dinnerstein, exemplifies that tinkerer’s esthetic. The gestures that are familiar to listeners from so much of the composer’s voluminous output — the chugging motor rhythms, minor-key harmonies, four-bar building blocks and burbling arpeggios — are almost all present and accounted for.
Yet the main point, as always, is to focus on the uses to which he puts those well-worn tools. Glass may work with a smaller box of Legos than most composers, but his building projects are still endlessly varied and often riveting.
The new concerto, which capped a largely engaging concert in Herbst Theatre on Saturday, May 19, exemplifies this lesson. It’s a threemovement creation, running about 35 minutes, that both recycles and reinterprets Glass’ vocabulary in the light of a couple of surprising inspirations.
One is Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, whose rhetoric and formal plan infuse the first movement. Like Beethoven, Glass gives the opening minutes to the pianist for a long unaccompanied chordal passage, and the contrast between the two compositional voices — between Beethoven’s tender rhapsody and the moody ruminations of Glass — runs like a subtext through the entire movement.
The other arrives in the finale, which, though overextended, stands as the radiant heart of the new work. This one movement is dedicated to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and it draws its ethos of still-voiced serenity — so different from the edginess and urgency that characterize Glass’ own creative voice — from Pärt’s music.
In between comes a long series of episodes, by turns gripping and diffuse, that fuse the efforts of the piano soloist and the string orchestra (Glass has no particular interest in the drama of conflict that characterizes the 19th century concerto). Many of the individual passages are striking in their harmonic turns or rhythmic tweaks; the overall formal path of the first two movements is not always easy to discern.
Dinnerstein, for whom the piece was written, proved an admirable interpreter, bringing dexterity to the first two movements and an air of weighty patience to the monolithic finale. The orchestra, led by guest concertmaster Zachary De Pue, provided a balanced counterpoint.
Balances were more problematic in the companion piece, Bach’s G-Minor Concerto, BWV 1058. Dinnerstein can be an eloquent Bach pianist on her own, as her recordings attest, but on this occasion it was hard to pick out her contributions amid an orchestra that tended to bury the piano.
The evening’s short first half was given over to the orchestra alone, beginning with Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony in G Minor and continuing with “Aheym,” Bryce Dessner’s exercise in vigorous nostalgia. De Pue showed off his gifts as a violinist in Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso No. 12, “La Folia,” a set of variations that called for virtuoso passagework from him and from cellist Robin Bonnell. All three pieces got fine, vivacious readings.
Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman