Philip Glass String Quartets

Philip Glass, String Quartets 1-4, Carducci Quartet, (Naxos)

Lots of Handel sounds like lots of other Handel and lots of Elgar sounds like other Elgar, etc. so it's quite likely that some Philip Glass will sound like other Philip Glass. His minimalist label can tempt people into thinking that his music is all repetitive and even more similar to itself than any other composer but less can be more in some respects and the opera Akhnaten and Violin Concerto, for examples, are glorious in very different ways.

On the other hand, it wasn't long before I was thinking that some of this music sounded like Glass's brilliant Solo Piano CD. I checked the sleeve notes and it makes no mention of it so perhaps some Philip Glass sounds like other Philip Glass.

By an unfair trick of programming here, the first quartet, which is much earlier (1966) is placed third so that having got into the film music, pulsing, meditating, leitmotifing its way merrily or thoughtfully along, one is suddenly taken back into a barer, less comforting world. It has more in common with earlier twentieth century modernism, spare and disturbed, post-holocaust. If it were film music, too, you would know the ghost was due to make an appearance. Like Arvo Part and John Tavener, as examples, Glass didn't arrive at his successful mature style immediately, then, and its informative to hear this early piece set amid its more harmomious successors.

Perhaps with his reputation going before him, Glass is not always given credit for the range of music he has produced and these four pieces are noticeably different in atmosphere and much less mechanised than the really repetitive material like, say, Dancepieces.

The Carducci Quartet make a fine sound in the acoustic of a Gloucestershire church. The CD is priced in typically Naxos fashion so it can't be any less than recommended.