Symphony No. 3: Music From: The Voyage/The Civil Wars/The Light

Next, two scene-change interludes from the CIVIL warS, omitted from the 1999 recording of Glass and Wilson's aborted Olympics spectacle, surround the "Mechanical Ballet" from the Columbus opera The Voyage. As excerpts, these pieces cannot significantly influence our interpretation of Glass's evolving aesthetic, but they offer revealing snapshots of works that have never been completely represented on disc. The last track, The Light, part of his Portraits of Nature trilogy (along with Itaipu and The Canyon), was booed on its Cleveland premiere. However, there's no good reason for such a response. By his own admission, Glass remains primarily a collaborative composer. It's easy enough to imagine this piece accompanying a retro silent film about Michelson and Morley, the two light-obsessed scientists Glass commemorates. Like The Canyon, this one-movement work demonstrates his good humor, fertile imagination, and skillful orchestration. His critics always claim that he lacks these gifts, that his music is nothing but the same thing over and over again. On the contrary, this marvelous disc shows how Glass's music is never the same thing, over and over again. --Robert Burns Neveldine