PHILIP GLASS (b.1937): Cello Concerto No. 2 "Naqoyqatsi".

Description: After a 10-year interval, to a commission by the Cincinnati S.O., Glass recomposed music from his 2001 score for the third film in Godfrey Reggio's 'Qatsi' trilogy to form this seven-movement cello concerto for the concert hall. The film score had been conceived orchestrally in any case, as a means of 'humanising' the digitally manipulated images in the film (a reversal of the previous two films, which featured keyboard-driven ensemble music but documentary-style footage juxtaposed and sped up slowed down). The film score also contained an important cello part, played by Yo Yo Ma on the soundtrack. The work thus contains extended passages of the kind of sustained melodic writing, still largely based on arpeggiated figures but without the familiar insistent minimalistic pulse, which became a feature of Glass' writing in the late '90s and early '00s. For much of the work's duration, though, the rippling textures underpinning soaring melodic lines, sumptuous orchestral chord progressions and syncopated percussive motion of seminal stage works such as Satyagraha and Akhnaten, predominate. Matt Haimovitz (cello), Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; Dennis Russell Davies.