After a twenty-year rest, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach has reawakened, in snowy Ann Arbor, Michigan. I've waited half my life to see the piece, and I was decidedly undisappointed: what an ecstatically dumbfounding thing this is. I'll say more in a piece on Glass's seventy-fifth-birthday festivities in The New Yorker next month. Mark Stryker has an article on the revival in the Detroit Free Press. The Ann Arbor performances were previews; the official premiere of the latest production will take place in Montpellier, France, in mid-March, with engagements following in Reggio Emilia (late March), London (May 4-13), Toronto (June 8-10), Brooklyn (Sept. 14-23), and Berkeley (Oct. 26-28).
Browsing at Encore Records beforehand — Ethan Iverson introduced me to this excellent store last year — I picked up a miniature score of Die Meistersinger and happened upon a curious coincidence:
It all goes back to Wagner.
