Performs Philip Glass - Dublin Guitar Quartet (2014)

There’s an ongoing debate at my house about whether not there’s anything to be gained by listening to Glass (O_o, 0_0, o_o)

The criticism is from my daughter the violist, and I’ll grant that It’s possible one of Glass’s goals has always been to punish the musicians he’s writing for. Lengthy pieces full of difficult repetition and interlocking patterns that aren’t always obvious.

That said, I’ve always thought of his most famous string quartets as being more stripped down and personal, with more pathos that you’re going to get from a five-hour opera where performers have to sit frozen in place for most of it.

Here those quartets are played by four guitars, which gives them even more detail and nuance. What you lose in some of the strings’ dynamic crashes, you get back in the guitars’ wide range of timbres that the string quartet can’t replicate.

These guitarsts find a level of personality approaching humor in music that often sounds deadly serious in its original form.