Back to basics with the Philip Glass Ensemble

The Philip Glass Ensemble came to Colston Hall as the culminating event of Bristol’s Glassfest collaboration between the Colston Hall, St George’s and the Watershed cinema to present the première of Philip Glass Ensemble: Retrospective. 

Introduced by Southbank Centre’s artistic director, Jude Kelly, this latest instalment of The Rest is Noise festival felt like one of those events that rarely finds its way into the concert diary. A packed hall witnessed one of those feats of sheer physical, intellectual and emotional energy that you are unlikely to forget.

Philip Glass’ ability to draw an audience of massively varied age groups is impressive. The event in question, which ran for two nights, certainly addressed the Edinburgh International Festival 2013’s theme of how artists engage with technology.

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