Philip Glass Creates Soothing Patterns

Listening to Philip Glass play his solo piano music is like sitting in the Laundromat. A peaceful, predictable hum throbs in the pleasantly warm air. Things tumble round and round, shifting cycles now and then, spinning, lolling, hypnotizing. You sink into your chair, breathing regularly. It’s difficult to suppress a yawn.

And the pieces Glass played Saturday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale differed from one another about as much as laundry loads do. It didn’t matter that one of them, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” was originally designed to accompany an Allen Ginsberg poem, and another, “Mad Rush,” was originally for organ--they were the same in approach and result. You get the idea that Glass doesn’t throw away enough, that he thinks that any variation on his theme is worth preserving.

You also wonder what he’s aiming at. If it’s to set in motion mesmerizing patterns, to soothe rather than stimulate a listener, he’s successful.

Glass took a bit of a departure from the other pieces (which also included an excerpt from “Satyagraha” and “Five Metamorphoses”) in his Six Etudes, a work-in-progress eventually supposed to reach evening-length proportions. In it, Glass drew on such forebears as Chopin and Liszt, ranging wider in his harmony and form, setting up tricky and showy pianistic challenges. There was a sense of a composer not just spinning notes but applying himself. And it was welcome.