Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
Symphony No. 8	Philip Glass	Listen

Reviews

• Beginning like an exuberant concerto for orchestra and turning to lyrical gloom, Glass has given a fresh twist to his current penchant for slow endings. The bright start lays out several fast themes in contrasted colours and gives them a 20-minute workout at full speed: variations, new permutations and bracing cross-rhythms tumble over one another as the character turns shadowy, culminating in a menacing ostinato and a wittily harmonised dissolve.
  
  The performers’ polish and commitment are exceptional … another extended sweep in a single tempo, first a passacaglia which becomes dominated by its first, solemn variant for brass and then a short, intensely hushed epilogue, its haunting melody for cor anglais akin to the brass passage and providing an apt summation of the symphony’s unexpected progress. Along with No 6, one of the best things Glass has done in the genre.
  Robert Maycock, BBC Music Magazine, 01 August 2006
• Lasting about 40 minutes, it consists of three movements, each shorter than its predecessor, so that the first movement is as long as the other two put together. Most of the musical variety comes from that opening movement too; it’s a carefully constructed patchwork made up from no less than eight distinct themes, which Glass develops and superimposes in an impressively contrapuntal way that’s a reminder he studied in Paris in the early 1960s with Nadia Boulanger. After that a passacaglia provides the cool centre, while the finale is far more concentrated and concise.
  , The Guardian, 14 July 2006
• [Symphony no. 8] is about continuous change...the chromaticism that has crept into Mr. Glass' music since 'Koyaanisqatsi' is now more extreme, and more fluid. Indeed, the great attraction of the work is the unpredictable orchestration.
  , New York Times