Philip Glass: Musical Offering

Orange Mountain Music presents the new album 'Musical Offering' by pianist Feico Deutekom. This new album presents new piano arrangements of classic works by Philip Glass as well as pieces originally composed for piano by Glass himself. Performed by Feico Deutekom who has a long working relationship with Philip Glass and is one of the preeminent specialists of late-Minimalist music, this new album presents new and old music in ways it's never been heard before.

The album starts with Deutekom's arrangement of 'Facades' from Philip Glass's landmark 1982 recording Glassworks. Dreamy and romantic in its original form, when played on piano, Facades takes on a new beautiful dimension. This precedes Glass's music for 'Company', which was originally incidental music for a 1980 production of the Samuel Beckett play of the same name. Glass turned this short four-movement piece into his Second String Quartet, one of his most popular pieces, and it is heard here for the first time on solo piano.

We jump forward to one of Glass's most recent works, his 'Distant Figure' (Passacaglia for Solo Piano)" from 2017 which Deutekom plays with incredible introspection. Deutekom's expertise in the realm of late-period Minimalism comes to the fore in Distant Figure as well as in two other interpretations of Glass's piano music including his Etude No.16 and the gorgeous Etude No.20 - the last piece in the set of twenty piano etudes which Glass composed between the years 1994 and 2012.

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his new album contains even more works heard on piano for the first time. These jewels include 'Offering' from the set of pieces Glass composed with Ravi Shankar in 1990 for the album 'Passages', an finally Deutekom features three selected movements from Glass's 1996 dance-opera 'Les Enfants Terribles' (The Holy Terrors) which was inspired by the story by Jean Cocteau. This recording is being released on Philip Glass's birthday of January 31, 2020.