Performer: Michael Riesman

Philip Glass’ Music with Changing Parts returns to London after a 48-year hiatus.

Philip Glass performs his music to the film Dracula, alongside the Kronos Quartet at the Philharmonie de Paris.

When I first saw Jean Cocteau’s 1946 cinematic masterpiece La Belle et la Bête on DVD several years ago, its visual storytelling made such a strong impression that a few of its images became unforgettably burned into my memory: disembodied hands grasping candles, statues that blinked, and the Beast himself, a giant kitty-cat who was more pathetic and sad than terrifying.

It isn’t so much that Einstein on the Beach is impossible to summarise, I don’t think, as that it’s just impossible generally. At least, if you were to list this opera’s various constituent elements to somebody, and ask them if it was basically plausible, they would probably say no. Suffice it to say the following: it is four and a half hours long and there is no interval.

Philip Glass came to Amsterdam for a series of two concerts in the three-year-old Rabozaal theatre of De Melkweg. I attended the second show, billed as “An evening of film music and dance”. Glass himself opened the night playing Metamorphosis II on the piano, apparently because he was asked to do so. Fortunately he did it with great verve and suppleness.