Interprets

Vanessa Wagner is a prolific and celebrated pianist, winner of a Victoire de la Musique Award, and director of the Chambord and Giverny music festivals, as well as an interpreter of works by Mozart, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky, among many others. With the forward-thinking French label InFiné, she has embraced minimalist composers, dedicating albums to the works of major auteurs of the genre, including John Adams, Meredith Monk, Brian Eno, Ryūichi Sakamoto, as well as the new generation of this category—Caroline Shaw, Bryce Dessner, and Nico Muhly. It seemed inevitable that a recording of Philip Glass’s études would be made.

The wait is over. With Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes, these piano works from the acclaimed minimalist composer are given their due. The set is spread out across four LPs or two CDs, a little more than two hours of sumptuous solo piano. Glass’s piano études certainly embrace the minimalist stylings he has been employing for decades, but they’re not without a romantic, ethereal sense of longing, not to mention a more emotional direction.

The études were composed over a period marked by special commissions and artistic introspection, originating in the early 1990s as sketches for the Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo. As he was met with increased demand for solo piano performances, Glass refined these sketches into two comprehensive volumes, each containing two études.

The multifaceted “Etude No. 1” sets the scene, both sharp and dreamy in equal measure, while the following “Etude No. 2” is more consistently luminous but with its own set of sharp edges. “Etude No. 3” is mostly a lightning-fast exercise, recalling the urgent modernism of Hindemith. You get the picture. While these études comprise two ten-piece volumes, they all contain a uniqueness that allows them to stand on their own individual merits.

While there are multiple dimensions to many of the pieces here, the connective tissue seems to be the repeated musical figures that make Philip Glass’s compositions truly his own. There is plenty of outside inspiration in the compositions, sometimes coming from unexpected places. “Etude No. 17”, for example, which Vanessa Wagner has described in the press notes as “radiantly lyrical, drifting between shifting atmospheres—at once luminous, tumultuous, translucent, and turbulent”, was once again inspired by a personal manuscript, “Magic Psalm”, discovered among the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.

“I made the musical language the center of the piece,” Glass wrote in his 2015 memoir, Words Without Music. “I began to use process instead of ‘story’, and the process was based on repetition and change… It was a way of paying attention to the music, rather than to the story the music might be telling. A psychology of listening is involved in this. One of the most common misunderstandings of the music was that the music just repeated all the time.”

While the études span a variety of emotions and traverse multiple musical avenues, Vanessa Wagner is steadfast in bringing this eclecticism to the performances. Her ability to navigate these multifaceted pieces so consistently is highly commendable and a wondrous listening experience. “After more than three decades dedicated to interpreting the classical canon,” she explained, “discovering Philip Glass’s music has, in a profound sense, reshaped my identity as a musician”. This recording of these 20 intense, radiant piano works is proof not only of Glass’s compositional prowess, but also of Wagner’s dedication to bringing them to dazzling life.