uhoh. not good. i’ve yet to read a good review of the movie, and this cd review isn’t going to be any better.
if you ask me, a big waste of both glass’s and yo-yo ma’s talents. of course the album is a re-hashing of the main philip glass theme (the one that features on almost every album, from la belle et la bàö√ßte through the secret agent, to the string quartets), but that in itself shouldn’t be a bad thing. glass has proven he can do wonders with it.
however, the music seems like somebody’s taken that theme, and has been running it through all kinds of electronical devices to see what effects they can come up with. at its best it’s solo cello, but at its worst it’s a bad imitation of already a really bad pop song.
glass can say in the notes
my instinct was to balance the quite startling effect of the synthetically composed images with a sound world of ‘natural’ timbres.
unfortunately the ‘synthetic’ feeling overrules any ‘natural’ perceptions that might have been intended, and even the nice ‘voice’ of the cello (notice how, all of a sudden i’ve been using quotes).
the notes (both by glass and by reggio) keep droning on about how ‘acoustic’ the music is, about the ‘human’ aspect and the ‘forces of nature’. don’t be deceived, if this is the fruit of a 25 year effort to write this score, then please, he shouldn’t have bothered.