Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
For reasons I can’t quite articulate, Philip Glass tops the list of composers whose music friends and colleagues keep telling me I really ought to love but that, in fact, I don’t. (The rest of the list is confidential, and I will neither confirm nor deny that Bruckner’s name appears anywhere on it.) However, I have become smitten with one freshly blown Glass recording: Songs and Poems for solo cello, played by Wendy Sutter. Instead of the richly layered thrumming of his orchestral pieces, which often put me in mind of a showroom full of idling Jaguars, Glass has pared his patterns down so that they sound intensely personal. Glass and Sutter reportedly fell in love over this score, and it does have a romantically melancholy tone. It’s not a conversation, though, but a soliloquy, that most unsociable of forms. Sutter has a big sound, which makes her cello seem that much more solitary–a filament of expression; a lone, repeating rune. The CD includes Tissues, for cello, percussion, and piano, from 2002, which is chamber music of a particularly stark and lonely, though eerily beautiful kind. The patterns seem like stutters here: the cello keeps trying to formulate a complete thought–to connect with instruments that either keep their distance by moving along in parallel motion or shimmer in a floating harmonic halo.
