Description
//Nonesuch//
£34.99 – 2xLP
First time on vinyl!
Originally released in 1995, the album features David Harrington (violin), John Sherba, (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Joan Jeanrenaud (cello) performing Quartet No. 2 (Company) (1983), No. 3 (Mishima) (1985), No. 4 (Buczak) (1990), and No. 5 (1991), the first piece Glass wrote especially for Kronos. Recorded at Skywalker Sound in California, the album was produced by Judith Sherman, Kurt Munkacsi, and Philip Glass. The cover art features Francesco Clemente’s painting The Four Corners (1985). At the time of the album’s release, the New York Times said, “It contains some of Glass’s best music since Koyaanisqatsi. His ear for sumptuous string sonorities is undeniable,” while the Washington Post called it “an ideal combination of composer and performers.” It was a top 10 hit on Billboard’s Top Classical Albums and spent 12 weeks on Billboard’s Classical chart.
In his original liner note, critic Mark Swed wrote, “Glass’s string quartets may contain his most intimate music. They are works through which a very public composer, perhaps the most important opera reformer of our age and a longstanding collaborator in large-scale music theater, holds up a mirror to himself and his way of composing. ‘In an odd way,’ Glass explains, ‘string quartets have always functioned like that for composers. I don’t really know why, but it’s almost impossible to get away from it. It’s the way composers of the past have thought and that’s no less true for me. It’s almost as if we say we’re going to write a string quartet, we take a deep breath, and we wade in to try to write the most serious, significant piece that we can.’ Glass says that as he sat down to write String Quartet No. 5, he had discovered that perhaps not taking a serious tone might be the most serious way to deal with it. ‘I was thinking that I had really gone beyond the need to write a serious string quartet and that I could write a quartet that is about musicality, which in a certain way is the most serious subject.’”
