Search - Philip Glass :: The Witches of Venice

A Delightful Treat For Eyes and Ears

Marvin Cohodas | Vancouver, BC, Canada | 11/17/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Philip Glass and the late children's book illustrator and set designer Beni Montresor collaborated on the children's opera-ballet The Witches of Venice, which premiered in 1995 at the La Scala Opera House in Milan as Le Streghe di Venezia. OMM has produced a combined children's book and opera recording, with the music trimmed to 70 minutes occupying a single disk. The story book is simply but beautifully illustrated, with the text containing narration as well as the Italian texts of the songs with their English translations.



The story, based on an earlier (1989) children's book by Montresor, concerns the Venetian royal family. The king laments the lack of an heir but refuses the help offered him by fairies, who present him with a magic plant. When he discards the plant a servant puts it into the garden. As the fairies predicted, the plant produces an heir, called Plant Boy. The king refuses to recognize Plant Boy's humanity and locks him in the garden. Desperately lonely, Plant Boy fashions a bird with twigs, and the wind provides the propulsion for his adventures. Plant Boy seeks out Plant Girl, who is similarly held in captivity by the Witches. After courageously overcoming the dangers of the witches' mansion he rescues Plant Girl and they fly away together.



The story is directed at young children, and clearly conveys the messages that children deserve nurturing, that no one should be rejected for being different, and that imagination is the key to liberation. The target audience will need caregivers to read the book and translate the songs, providing the very nurturing that the story's protagonists have been denied.



The music is largely produced by synthesizer. The resulting transparent orchestration, simple riffs, and rich melodies will appeal particularly to children. The songs are also easily learned, most composed of a few phrases repeated to a simple melody. Plant Boy is actually sung by a child, and the wind is a children's chorus. To further stimulate a child's interest, the music is often accompanied by humourous sound effects. But there is also plenty in the music to hold adult's interests. Glass has produced a rich score that is wonderfully varied in colour, from the simple refrain of Plant Boy, to the manic dance (a tarantella?) of the Witches, to the majestic arrival of the guests in gondolas.



The Witches of Venice is a delightful treat for child or adult, meant to be repeatedly savoured. The perfect gift."

NY Times Review "Philip Glass Casts New Spells, Including On

R. Guerin | Brooklyn, NY | 11/27/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"BOUTIQUE labels run by composers and performers are supposed to be the hot new thing, but Philip Glass took charge of his own recordings in the early 1970s, when he began releasing his ensemble's performances on his own Chatham Square label. Mr. Glass has always been savvy about sound: his audio engineer, Kurt Munkacsi, has been a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble since the early days. Both Mr. Glass and Mr. Munkacsi have overseen most of Mr. Glass's recordings, even those released by other labels. And they have usually maintained control of the master tapes.



Not long ago, Mr. Munkacsi set out to archive Mr. Glass's tape library, which includes not only the studio masters but stacks of concert recordings as well. And the archiving project led to the next logical step: Orange Mountain Music, a label through which Mr. Glass could release new recordings and reissue old ones, as well as lending his spotlight to composers and ensembles he admires, as he did on Point Music, his boutique label for Universal. Lately, the Glass factory has been spinning out recordings every few weeks, both on CD and in compilations available only through iTunes.



The gem in the most recent batch is "The Witches of Venice," a zesty children's opera-ballet, set to a libretto by Beni Montresor and packaged in a CD-size hardcover book. The piece is about a boy who was born from a magic flower and lived with the king and queen of Venice before flying off on a wooden pigeon to rescue a girl of similar provenance from a group of witches.



The work has slipped under the radar of much of Mr. Glass's adult audience, and it is surprising and uncharacteristic. Its 24 movements are brief, and Mr. Glass's energetically rhythmic, repetitive thumbprints are everywhere; but so are sound effects that point up the magical aspects of the story, and stretches of dramatic, colorful scoring that is not immediately identifiable as Mr. Glass's. Who would have thought, back in the days of "Einstein on the Beach," with its embrace of nonnarrative theater, that Mr. Glass would someday offer vivid musical portraits of witches, fairies, ogres and a magical Plant-Boy?



Many of Mr. Glass's works are about discovery, sometimes spiritual ("Akhnaten") or scientific ("The Light") but often geographical, with social underpinnings. In "The Voyage" (two CDs), written for the Metropolitan Opera in 1992, the subject is Columbus, with a parallel plot about space travelers crashing on Earth. Where "The Witches of Venice" paints pictures with music, "The Voyage," like many of Mr. Glass's full-scale operas, is a grandly ritualistic spectacle in which staging is a crucial element, with the music often simply chugging along in support.



The ideal format for many of these works is DVD. Still, Dennis Russell Davies, leading the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and soloists and chorus from the Landestheater Linz, draws a solid, sometimes weighty reading that captures the monumental qualities one heard in the Met production.



"The Concerto Project, Volume 2" includes another installment in the discovery series, the Piano Concerto No. 2, "After Lewis and Clark." This 2004 score is built on an odd hybrid of Mr. Glass's ostinatos, Lisztian thunder (supplied with deft fluidity by Paul Barnes, the pianist) and an evocation of American Indian music. Some of the Indian themes have the feel of 19th-century salon music, but they work best in an attractive central movement dominated by R. Carlos Nakai's wooden flute.



The companion work is the Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra (2001), a Baroque-gone-haywire score in which 18th-century figurations and ornaments morph into (and sometimes escape) Mr. Glass's signature repeating cells. Jillon Stoppels Dupree, the harpsichordist, does a superb job of moving between the two worlds. (Ralf Gothoni conducts the Northwest Chamber Orchestra in both works.)



Also not to be missed is "Analog," which includes a vividly remixed version of "North Star" (1977), one of Mr. Glass's early Virgin recordings. Unlike most of his works of the time, this film score is built of short works that develop comparatively quickly. Joining it here are "Dressed Like an Egg" (1977) and an organ solo, "Mad Rush" (1980), previously available only in a limited edition given away as a subscription bonus for the long-defunct SoHo Weekly News."

A reinvented Biblical tale

Jacques COULARDEAU | OLLIERGUES France | 09/20/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It all starts with the desire of the King of Venice to have an heir procreated by the philosophers of the world, which leads to total failure. The singing is at the crossroads of Purcell's harmony and modern amplified singing, and the musical sentences open and close in mid-air between tonal notes. The use of electro-acoustic instruments introduces a very modern texture to the music, flying easily in thin air and with rhythmic notes building a sound solid background. The Fairies are thus invoked with long sort of repetitive notes on a background of an ever-turning harmonic phrase. They bring a metaphor of the sexual act that could give birth to a child. A tree to be planted and grown tall carefully and when it finally blooms, explodes into blooms, ejaculates blooms, a child can be born. But the king throws this simple lesson of sexual education in the form of a tree through the window. A maid, sustained by red wine, plants the tree in the garden. And the sun warms up the plant into producing a child that springs out of it. But the king refuses what is evident and has the child imprisoned in the tree by twelve guards, twelve mind you like Jesus' apostles. And the sun feeds the boy with the fruit of the tree. And the flower-boy knows better. He feels abandoned and even rejected as the human boy he knows he is. The music has a very somber and sad tone at that moment, regretting the freedom the boy never had. And it is then that two witches come to visit the boy and find out he is just like the flower girl they have. So they invite the King and his Queen to their Summer Dance and the boy who has overheard about the flower girl wants to escape and find her. This arrival of the witches is dramatic indeed and with a complete change of music. Staccatos, and brutal percussions, tambourines and heavy ascending notes on the keyboard and some electric flashes of sound like lightning behind. Both turning and spinning, tumbling and rotating, and at the same time hammering the supernatural event into our ears. With the help of the wind and the creation of a twig and branch pigeon he builds, he escapes the garden and flies over the heads of the guards. And the opera considers this expulsion and escape from the garden of birth as the real birth of the boy as a boy. The garden of Eden was a prison and here the boy, the very fruit of the tree, escapes it to look for a girl. Complete reversal of the garden of Eden. He is flown over Venice and some organ music tells us they are arrived at the Witches' castle. And he just has to use the door-handle to open the door and enter. The boy searches the palace but he is assaulted by ghosts and phantoms. In the wine-cellar he asks for the flower-girl from a narcissistic ogre. And the organ again sounds up and powerful like the enchanted place or the voice of the ogre. He sings as if out of Monteverdi and seems to have a special diet: only European princesses and American heiresses. Pigeon and boy, with the help of the wind, escape up the stairs chased by the ogre. We get then a music that is directly inspired from the accompanying music of mute films in the old days. And we move to the Summer Dance of the Witches. They are getting ready for their favorite entertainment: dancing. But the boy goes on climbing and finds himself ion the bedrooms of the witches that he searches. Then to the tower where he finds the room of the witch mother who refuses to dance. In spite of the cautious advice given to him by the wind, he goes into the room. The music changes and from a dance we get into a march of demons. But the witch mother refuses to answer. So the boy goes to the ball-room, the only room he has not searched yet. The guests are arriving in gondolas and the King and Queen finally come in splendor and glory. But they reject and kick away the pigeon and the boy who gets sad and starts crying. The sadness of the moment is expressed by a musical sentence that ends lamenting in midair or mid-score and suddenly decays into nothingness. The world is gone. The boy is alone and crying. And he then discovers the little flower-girl has been imprisoned in the chandelier. With the help of the wind she jumps into the pigeon. The music changes with plenty of voices and crystalline sounds bringing dawn and daybreak. And the pigeon suddenly flies away with the boy and the girl to meet the sun and the wind in the sky of Venice. And that is the final birth this time escaping the chandelier of the witches, escaping some curse like Sleeping Beauty woken up by the Prince Charming. And it all ends with the maid who is well seasoned in red wine. As if this fairy and witch story could only be produced by drunkenness, and as if wine was the only potion that could bring happy endings. The last piece introduces chords that could come out of Elm Street, hummed by Freddy Kruger, the danger they have escaped from. The music is expressive to the utmost inspired by the music the cinema is using all the time but also by integrating all the possibilities of modern amplification and electro-acoustic instruments. The voice are used to create a supplementary level in that sound universe and to humanize the sensations we may feel and experience. This musical composition is a perfect dramatic ballet.



Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

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