This is the best news I've had so far this year (it's a few weeks old, but I only just found out): the full Einstein on the Beach opera is to be revived and tour around the world, including London, in 2012. I guess it will be at the Barbican, though the Roundhouse could make an interesting venue. Either way, I'll be there.
Along with United States, Einstein on the Beach is one of the shows I've long wished I'd seen. I saw the BBC Arena profile of Robert Wilson in 1985, and was transfixed. (I think, when the end-of-year TV ratings were published, this particular Arena episode had fewer viewings than any other programme.) I was fascinated by the visual repetition, playing with scale (and duration); Wilson's fascination with the way Einstein held his finger and thumb in all available photographs; his two adopted sons, Raymond Andrews (a deaf-mute) and Christopher Knowles, who was in an institution for brain-damaged children when Wilson came across him.
I don't know quite how, but the linguistic habits and challenges faced by these young men informed the text of Einstein. And the text, with its obsessive counting, repeated phrases, some of them unfurling gradually so that the syntax altered in increments — at times it's formally almost as musical as the music. It is, by some distance, my favourite work by Philip Glass.
The Arena progamme doesn't seem to have made it onto YouTube, but here are clips from a couple of other documentaries, one from across the pond, and the other, I think, from Europe:
Sadly I haven't had the time I would have liked to devote to listening attentively to, and researching the context of, this piece. Remember that newspaper I mentioned on New Year's Eve? I found out two hours into 2011 that I'd been designing it for the wrong size paper, and every waking hour not spent shepherding the Boy has been absorbed by work on that. Deadline is in 24 hours.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
If you will forgive me, I find everything I've ever heard by Phillip Glass to sound as if it is bits of the same piece of music. Now I realise there is such a thing as a signature sound. Why not long ago I beleive someone had made comments to this effect regarding the blues. But with P. Glass, it usually gives me that, eyes glaze over, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, sensation. By the way, good luck with the deadline.
Posted by: Fred Stagg | 03 January 2011 at 01:59 AM