Happy Birthday, Philip Glass!!!

Martin Acrainer in Orphée (left) and Spuren der Verirrten (right)

Nary a year goes by where we don't celebrate the birthday of American composer Philip Glass who turns 77 today.

Many of his 20+ operas have become staples of the standard repertory including Hydrogen Jukebox, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage. We've featured many of the more obscure operas on this site, including Kepler, Les Enfants Terribles, The Perfect American, Orphée and Galileo Galilei, which have become popular vehicles for barihunks like Martin Achrainer, Philip Cutlip, Matthew Worth, Nicholas Nelson and Timothy McDevitt.

Glass was born in Baltimore and studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Guillaume Andrieux in Philip Glass' Les Enfants Terribles

Glass likes speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

Upcoming performances of Glass operas include The Trial, which will run at the Theater Magdeburg from April 1-May 8 with barihunk Johnny Herford as Josef K. In the U.S., Hydrogen Jukebox will play at the Long Beach Opera from May 30-June 7. Perhaps the most popular Glass opera this season is Akhnaten, which will play in Antwerp in February, Gent in March, Heidelberg in March and Maastricht in June.

Martin Achrainer (shirtless) in another Philip Glass premiere

Martin Achrainer in Spuren der Verirrten

Tyrolian barihunk Martin Achrainer is making quite a name for himself as an exponent of new works by American minimalist composer Philip Glass. An alert reader spotted these pictures from Glass' new German language opera Spuren der Verirrten (“Footprints of the Lost”)," which is based on the play by Peter Handke. We've previously seen Achrainer in Glass' Orphée and in the world premiere of Kepler.

Much of this is attributable to the fact that Achrainer is in the ensemble at the Landestheater Linz, where the music director and principal conductor is long-time Philip Glass collaborator and champion Dennis Russell Davies.  Glass wrote “Spuren der Verirrten” for the opening of the new Musiktheater am Volksgarten, a state-of-the-art opera house that Davies was instrumental in getting built.

Martin Achrainer in Spuren der Verirrten

Although the world premiere of Spuren der Verirrten was in April of this year, the opera is being perfromed again beginning on November 9 and running into January 2014. Tickets are available online. 

Achrainer's character is called "F' and the rest of the cast includes A, B, C, D...you get the picture. Although the opera has many of the typical characteristics of the composer's works, including repetitiveness and minimalism, he has added alphorns and zithers to give it an Austrian flavor. The text is typical Glass, as well, with singers often repeating the question “Where are we?”

The joke at the opera house has been that this work is “Two Notes, One Opera.”