An Acquired Taste – Phillip Glass’ Satyagraha April 15, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , trackbackI was first introduced to Phillip Glass about twenty years ago, by the boyfriend at the time who was a fan, and saw his Ensemble perform at the Wellington Arts Festival in the late eighties. It took a while, but slowly his music grew on me. The distance between sublime subtlety and boring self-indulgence is a short one though, and he will never be an easy, mainstream composer.
Having persuaded friends to come with me to see Satyagraha, his opera about the life of Gandhi at the Coliseum last night, I was a little worried. The reaction was mixed, as you’d expect for 3.5 hours of very different music, with a libretto in Sanskrit and no surtitles, but for me, it was fantastic.
The music was typical Glass – subtle, sublime and at times intensely meditative. The voices became another instrument in the symphony, supporting the Indian idea of the sound of words having significance in their own right.
Visually it was spectacular. Huge puppets and stiltwalkers of Hindu gods and people; use of english translations from the Bhagavad Gita beamed onto the backdrop; each act represented by a mime figure of another advocate of non-violent resistance – Tolstoy, Tagore, King; layers of symbolism, some obvious, some obscure.
To me, the last scene of the last act was transcendent, in almost the same way that sitting in a meditation hall listening to Tibetan monks chanting is transcendent. Gandhi wanders around the stage, praying, while Martin Luther King stands on his high podium silently orating. Very little happens, but it brings the whole piece together and left this listener refreshed and somehow hopeful.
For a different view to mine, see Peter Conrad’s article in the New Statesman a couple of weeks ago. I think he’s unfair though to say that the music has ‘a sensuous enchantment that precludes any profounder meaning’, as last night seemed rather more than enchanting to me. However, that last scene was also the part that one of our party found rather self-indulgent.
Classical music often needs an educated ear, and mine is not great, but
I wonder if this also needs an ear aware of the philosophical and
cultural background as well.
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Comments»
I too caught Satyagraha at the Coliseum and was utterly spellbound by the last act. King had his back to us througout, looking to a world that we, the audience, couldn’t see – very moving. I was really reminded of the slo-mo ‘fighters’ representing the ongoing struggle of war in Akhnaten. I thought projection was used to good effect in this production, giving you the gist of the words from the Bhagvad Gita. The projected, exploding sky, surrounding King sucked you in, as if to heaven.