Whether or not Philip Glass is known for gravitas is, perhaps, a debatable point. His music is serious but not necessarily weighty. ‘Lyrical’ is another word one might apply to Glass’s music, but likely not without argument. Memorable, certainly, but his work isn’t often about building emotive eloquence through successive phrases. It’s more logical than that, more argument than poetry. Usually.
To be certain, a small and wonderfully resonant crypt below a 1915 church in upper Manhattan lit by something close to 100 candles lends a romantic flourish to the eye, which to some degree inevitably informs the ear. Such were the conditions under which the magnificent cellist Wendy Sutter presented Glass’ Songs and Poems I & II to a sold-out room of no more than 50 on 7th June, the first of three nights presented by Death of Classical. And such was the room in which the second book of Songs and Poems (which Sutter played first) positively sang in long, Schubertian lines with all the dark rumination of a Beethoven sonata.
Those aren’t names to toss around lightly. Those are names that hit not like cushions but rather like bludgeons. What was shocking wasn’t that the piece didn’t speak in the immediately recognizable syntax that made Glass a household name but that it was – with no names attached, with no Beethoven or Schubert or Glass – so mournful and yet so mesmerizingly beautiful.
Sutter played it with assured power and pride. Is it possible that a misstep in fingering threw a phrase out of time? It is possible, although not definitely so. It was a fleeting moment that didn’t matter anyway because the music breathed in ways quite unlike Glass – not like a steamboat or a steeplechase but like a person late and slightly panicked, like a person dismounting after making love, like a person sleeping fitfully or walking proudly. Glass’ music is often about people, crowds and cultures. Songs and Poems II, in Sutter’s hands, was about the individual.
Songs and Poems I, played second on the program, felt more familiarly Glass. The repeating lines in slight variation were present, the harmonies were bright and strong, but the architecture was still understated. It seemed a link between Glass’ better known work and the second set of wordless songs. The sequencing was smart. The first suite made for a musical reprieve after what was, even just to listen, an exhausting first half.
Songs and Poems II is not without drama of its own. It was written for Sutter (as was the first book) in 2012. She worked on it for a decade, edited it, made it into the spectacular piece she played in the crypt. In the meantime, however, the piece landed in the hands of cellist Matt Haimovitz, who recorded it under the name ‘Partitas for Solo Cello’. There is backstory there – more, to be sure, than the whisperings of a publicist after the program had been billed as a premiere would suggest. But it was the first performance by the dedicatee, and one that was more than memorable.
