Music Review : Philip Glass Plays Philip Glass at Recital

Philip Glass is the Richard Nixon of music. Either one appreciates the potent and subtle simplicity of Glass’ music, or one hears it as the Kansas of the ear: flat and treeless and stretching endlessly into nowhere. Indifference is not a possibility.

Some of the patrons at Wadsworth Theater in Westwood Saturday night obviously wandered into this event--a piano recital of his own music by the 57-year-old Baltimore-born composer--by accident. When intermission fell, exactly 40 minutes after the concert had begun, they were gone, without rudeness disappearing into the night.

Loyal followers of Glass had to be delighted at what they heard in both halves of this program, a pleasant mix of familiar solo pieces and new arrangements of more or less recent music.

This composer is no raving virtuoso, but he has the chops to play his own music--much of it of Schubertian difficulty--clearly and acceptably, with no apologies necessary. To put him in context: Glass plays Glass more easily than, say, Debussy (as heard on player-piano reconstructions) played Debussy.

This varied Glass agenda covered ground from 1976 to the present, opening with the signature “Opening” and closing with the near-benediction of a very brief excerpt from the opera “Satyagraha.”

In between, the highlights were three difficult etudes taken from “What’s So Funny?” and “Mad Rush” (given its title by choreographer Lucinda Childs), plus “Five Metamorphoses.” Those who find Glass’ music important as living art, and as part of the French/American mainstream, will find all these pieces important, too. Those who don’t will not be persuaded.