Essential

“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,” wrote Mark Swed in 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 studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and 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. By the late 1980s, Glass returned to his compositional roots in chamber and orchestral music, launching an extensive series of symphonic and concerted works that continues to this day, although he continues to perform regularly all over the world as keyboardist with his ensemble.

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.