New York label Orange Mountain Music’s latest, Philip Glass’s A Madrigal Opera, proffers fans of the minimalist icon perhaps the most incompetent handling of the composer’s music pressed to disc. The cycling arpeggios found throughout Glass’s scores are admittedly more difficult to play accurately on a string instrument than the fixed-pitch piano or keyboard, but for the eight-minute solo “Opening,” violinist Linda Hedlund’s intonation is a veritable moving target. Few violinists possess the facility of a Gidon Kremer, whose shimmering 1993 recording of the composer’s Concerto for Violin combines staggering virtuosity with technical acumen, but Hedlund’s wayward pitch here is exacerbated by a flat reading that is more Kreutzer étude than overture.
The album deteriorates from there. Composed in 1980, the opera contains no linear narrative and offers performers the enticing possibility of staging the piece however they like. As its narrative point of departure, Finnish group Ooppera Skaala chooses the symphonic poem Cameo by Lauri Otonkoski, with its themes of travel and discovery. Surely not what the producers intended, however, is the singers’ apparent Tolkien-like quest for a proper pitch.
Most frustrating about Ooppera Skaala’s corruption is that the work is quintessentially Glass, with compelling sonic analogies to his better known works such as “Koyaanisqatsi.” Given that Orange Mountain Music was founded by the 72-year-old composer, one can only hope that another recording session is in the works.
- Doyle Armbrust
published in Time Out Chicago on January 27th, 2010