Philip Glass: Symphony No. 6 ("Plutonian Ode")

CASE MEMORIAL LIBRARY CALL NUMBER: CD/CLASSICAL/Glass
Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times: "Ever since Beethoven's Ninth, composers have fallen over themselves getting vocal music into their symphonies. . . . but there is often a drawback: since the music's primary impulse is symphonic and the singers have to share the stage with the orchestra, sections of text slip into the ether unheard. Dennis Russell Davies has found an imperfect but fascinating solution in his recording of Philip Glass's Symphony No. 6 ("Plutonian Ode"), a 2001 setting of a searing 1978 excoriation of the war machine and nuclear proliferation by Allen Ginsberg. One disc presents the score as it is heard in concert, with Lauren Flanigan giving an emotionally charged, virtuosic account of Mr. Glass's high-flying, disjunct vocal part, and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz pumping its way through the insistently rhythmic instrumental writing. . . . On a second disc, a recording of Ginsberg's own reading is matched to the contours of Mr. Glass's setting, overlaid on the vocal line but not entirely replacing it. . . . [T]he straightforward performance has the edge. But the Ginsberg version is a useful and powerful alternative."