Glass: Violin concerto

Customer Rating:
Summary: like a never ending horse ride
Comment: if you're looking for music that sounds like a soundtrack for a movie you'll forget in 5 minutes, buy this disc. this music is really bad. at one point a violin line sounds like a vivaldi rip off, and you know what stravinsky said about vivaldi: "vivaldi was a very boring man who wrote the same concerto over and over." in a nutshell, glass's compositions sound like a second year piano student playing appegiated triads over and over and over and over............

Customer Rating:
Summary: Theatrical and Accessible
Comment: Albeit Glass is not for everyone (my girlfriend says he sounds like an alarm clock) but his minimalism (or more accurately, as he prefers, "theatre music") is accessible, simple and passionate. Glass provides marvelous music that sustains emotions for long amounts of time. His works are ideal for creative work (such as writing or painting) and I find that they are extremely inspirational and motivate me to draw or write sonnets.

Customer Rating:
Summary: A good showcase of Glass' virtues - and vices!
Comment: Glass' violin concerto is the core of this selection and the reason why I bought it. Glass can be magnificently meditative at his best and Tasmanian Adele Anthony pulls this out brilliantly with the sort of pure tone and crisp playing this piece needs.

The problem is with the accompanying pieces. Company, which precedes and the two excerpts from Akhnaten, which follow, are fine in their way. In fact the Prelude to Akhnaten is one of the finest pieces of one of the finest operas of recent times. It's just that the trouble with Glass is that be can be so... well, repetitive. The filler works sound too much like the Violin Conerto to be paired successfully with them. If Naxos were to pair this off with something suitably mellow by another contemporary composer - say Rutter or Pärt - they'd have a much stronger proposition.

As a Belfast man born and bred, I might be biased, but the Ulster Orchestra and their principal guest conductor Takuo Yuasa gave a good enough account of themselves here, and given the super budget price of this CD, the competition would have to be something special to justify the extra cost.

Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent introduction to Glass' music
Comment: I am a huge Philip Glass fan. At the same time, I realize that his work is not for all tastes. Working in the minimalist style, Glass' music is a unique sound experience. For those who are not familiar with his music, Naxos publication of Company, his Violin Concerto, and the overture and dance from Akhnaten, is a great, nonthreatening introduction to this composer. Company is a collection of four short pieces that are meditations on death, played by a string quartet. His Violin Concerto is the highlight of the CD, and the Second Movement is to date one of my favourite pieces of his.

Customer Rating:
Summary: a good place to begin if you've never heard any Glass
Comment: My first encounter with the Glass Violin Concerto was in the form of a dance piece devised by the fringe choreographer Mavin Khoo.The Glass worked brilliantly within this context but i doubted it would stand on it's own without the marriage with movement.
I was proven wrong as i've found the whole piece arresting from start to finish.Glass's trademark minor key arpeggiations sound marvellously idiomatic on the soloist and the slow movement is deeply affecting without being sickly sweet in any way.
Quite unexpectedly (I generally go for the more hard line modernist stuff)i've been won over so this Naxos CD is definitely a good place to start if you've never heard a piece of this guys music.
'Company' and the 'Dance' from Akhnaten are rather plodding by comparison with the Violin concerto but the Akhnaten prelude has a mysterious aura which immediately alerts ones attention.