Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà - Philip Glass: Portrait (2008)

Canadian violinist Angèle Dubeau and her ensemble La Pietà pay homage to Philip Glass with this disc of some of his music for strings, plus arrangements of other works of his. The arrangements are by Michael Reisman, who has collaborated closely with Glass since the period of Einstein on the Beach, so they are idiomatic and persuasively transfer the works to a new medium. Two of his arrangements, the Overture to La Belle et la Bête and The Hours Suite, taken from the film soundtrack, include an amplified arsenal of instruments, including piano, harp, and celeste. It's a particularly felicitous combination of instruments for Glass' music and makes those pieces really shimmer. The works originally for string quartet, Mishima (String Quartet No. 3) and Company (String Quartet No. 2) are played here by string ensemble, and they make the transition to the larger group with exceptional grace; it could in fact be argued that the music is better suited to the sonorities of a chamber orchestra than a quartet. Dubeau and La Pietà play Glass' music with a nuanced expressiveness that should dispel any lingering thoughts that Glass could be considered a mechanical composer. The lyrically moody Closing is especially lovely, and this performance is even more warmly engaging than the original version on the composer's 1981 album Glassworks. The sound is clean and intimate.