Glass: ‘Itaipu’
Munich Philharmonic; Brad Lubman, conductor (Münchner Philharmoniker)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music Classical or YouTube Music
Philip Glass’s “Itaipu,” a cantata-like work for chorus and orchestra, is named for a massive hydroelectric dam on the border between Brazil and Paraguay that the composer visited in 1988. The music enacts, in muscular sweep, the water’s progress from the state of Mato Grosso to Lake Itaipu to the dam itself, and finally out to the Atlantic Ocean. As this hymn to technology’s taming of nature plays out in the orchestra, the chorus, counterintuitively, sings a creation myth of the Guarani, the area’s Indigenous people.
Glass’s orchestral music, in particular, has been criticized for being too full of empty repetition. But especially in this potent new recording under Brad Lubman, the piece feels urgent and expansive. Glass’s depiction of the technological behemoth is spot on, and in the third movement (“The Dam”), there are some chromatic dissonances that undercut Glass’s recognizable arpeggiated motion. Lubman scales the dynamics of this section perfectly, building the orchestral and choral sound to a tremendous climax. But it’s the final movement that leaves the deepest impression, as eerie intonations from the chorus mark the dissipation of all that energy into the vast, open sea.
— David Weininger
‘Tchaikovsky’
Daniil Trifonov, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music Classical or YouTube Music
Something strange is happening in the land of the piano: Pianists youngish and younger have suddenly started playing solo Tchaikovsky, the kind of Tchaikovsky that their predecessors overlooked, even dismissed entirely. Just a few weeks ago, Yunchan Lim released a clearly adoring recording of “The Seasons,” barely a year after Bruce Liu had done the same. Beatrice Rana will bring Mikhail Pletnev’s arrangement of pieces from “The Nutcracker” to Carnegie Hall next month; Andrey Gugnin recently recorded them.
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