PHILIP GLASS – The Essential (2024 Reissue) – 4LP – Deluxe 180g Crystal Clear Vinyl Box Set

4LP – Limited Edition 180gCrystal Clear Vinyl Set housed in a deluxe heavyweight 10mm slipcase with 4-page booklet.Featuring the best/most memorable selections from Naqoyqatsi, Einstein on The Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, In the Upper Room, Songs from Liquid Days, The Photographer, Glassworks, Itaipu and more. Only1500 individually numbered copies pressed in this edition.

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas – Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously. 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.

In the past 30 years, Glass has composed more than twenty-five operas, large and small; twelve symphonies; three piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris‘s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ.

The Essential is available as a limited edition of 1500 individually numbered copies on crystal clear vinyl. The 4LP is housed in a deluxe 10mm slipcase sleeve and includes a 4-page booklet.

Tracklist:

A1. Lightning (From Songs From Liquid Days) [6:43]
A2. Facades (From Glassworks) [7:19]
A3. A Gentleman’s Honor (From The Photographer) [3:17]
A4. Primacy Of Number (From Naqoyqatsi) [6:52]

B1. Metamorphosis IV [7:00]
B2. Open The Kingdom – Liquid Days, Part II [7:00]
B3. Dance II (From In The Upper Room) [5:42]
B4. Dance VIII (From In The Upper Room) [4:48]

C1. Glasspiece #1 – Rubric (From Glassworks) [6:03]
C2. Changing Opinion (From Songs From Liquid Days) [9:56]
C3. Opening (From Glassworks) [6:18]

D1. Floe (From Glassworks) [5:59]
D2. Funeral Of Amenhotep III – Scene 1 (From Akhnaten) [8:59]
D3. Point Blank (From Naqoyqatsi) [11:17]

E1. Wichita Vortex Sutra [6:50]
E2. Forgetting (From Songs From Liquid Days) [8:05]
E3. Dance IX (From In The Upper Room) [8:08]

F1. The Dam (From Itaipu) [11:47]
F2. Definition (From Naqoyqatsi) [2:50]
F3. Protest (From Satyagraha) [4:19]