About this item

On Glass Piano Concerto No.3: Like a slowly-whirling centrifuge, Philip Glass s beguiling new Piano Concerto No. 3 given its world premiere at Jordan Hall on Friday by A Far Cry and pianist Simone Dinnerstein isolates and concentrates two aspects of the composer s personality long in particularly intriguing tension: his romantic streak and his meditative austerity. Much of the concerto is a lush churn of unsettled harmonies, soloist and string orchestra in search of resolution. Yet resolution comes not with triumph, but by deliberate, cyclical turns. Dinnerstein opened with a gentle clutch of full, familiar triadic chords, shifting by seconds and thirds, the tonality both enveloping and undermining itself. Throughout the first two movements, minor-tinged melodies and portions of quiet, chromatic bravura from the piano were like 19th-century ghosts drifting in and out of the shadows.