Glass, P: Naqoyqatsi: Primacy of Number

Michael Riesman is the conductor and producer of nearly every Philip Glass soundtrack recording, including the Academy-Award nominated scores to Kundun, The Hours, and last year’s Notes On A Scandal. Philip Glass Soundtracks presents his own transcriptions for solo piano of some of the best Glass film scores.

Riesman is also known as the Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble and has an association with the composer dating back to 1974. He has artfully served Glass' music as a producer, conductor, transcriber and pianist. Riesman was the masterful solo pianist on the soundtrack recording to The Hours. He later arranged its score into a three-movement concert suite for piano and orchestra which he has performed internationally with orchestras including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony and Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.

Recently, Riesman has been transcribing Glass' film music into virtuosic solo piano music and releasing CDs of these arrangements. This includes a transcription of the entire scores to The Hours (OMM0012) and the Glass score to Dracula (OMM0033) which he performs in a live-to-film in concert. Philip Glass Soundtracks features many new suites and transcriptions including music which has never been heard before. The films, which span over 20 years of Glass’ composition for the medium, are No Reservations, Naqoyqatsi, A Brief History Of Time, Anima Mundi, Jenipapo, Mishima, La Belle et La Bête (Glass’s 1995 opera used as an alternative score for Jean Cocteau’s iconic film), Neverwas (Riesman also conducted the Neverwas soundtrack which was released in August as OMM0052), Candyman, The Fog of War, Notes On A Scandal, and The Illusionist.

“Philip Glass is surely the world’s best-known living serious composer. His is a readily identifiable, if ever controversial, style that is both imitated and parodied the world over. He is familiar to pop audiences, crossover audiences, new music audiences, opera audiences and increasingly to chamber music audiences and symphony goers,” (Gramophone)

To celebrate Glass’ 75th birthday on January 31, 2012, Sony Classical offers The Essential Philip Glass, a three disc overview of the composer’s prolific output that led to his rise as a cultural icon from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It encompasses generous selections from the three seminal “Portrait Operas” (Einstein On The Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten) that established Glass as a serious, innovative classical composer, dance scores for Twyla Tharp (In the Upper Room) and Jerome Robbins (Songs from Liquid Days), theater works (The Photographer), plus music for solo piano and collaborations with artists as wide-ranging as Suzanne Vega, Linda Ronstadt, the Kronos Quartet and Yo-Yo Ma.

Born in Baltimore on January 31st 1937, Glass began to develop his signature style while working in experimental theater and as musical director alongside Ravi Shankar for the film Chappaqua. He formed The Philip Glass Ensemble in 1971, whose blend of electronic keyboards, reed instruments and female voices resulted in a unique, and energetic sound world, heard at its driving, hard-hitting early peak in the Einstein On The Beach excerpts recorded in 1979.

In addition to eight Grammy Award nominations, Glass’ numerous film scores have significantly contributed to the genre’s development, earning him three Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score. His score to The Truman Show (1999) won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, and he also won the National Endowment for the Arts’ Opera Honors Award in 2010. Philip Glass is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.