Philip Glass’ Low Symphony arrived in 1993 as an orchestral interpretation of the classic David Bowie collaboration with Brian Eno. It was an oddity, actually, that made sense.
Originally an experimental recording of startling depth and complexity, it follows that Low would transfer well into this unusual iteration. Glass – a perennial Academy Award-nominated classical-music composer – took three of the album’s instrumentals and combined them with compositional elements of his own, beginning with “Subterraneans,” then the Berlin-era leftover “Some Are” and finally “Warswaza.”
The Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies – he’d notably recorded with pianist Keith Jarrett as a soloist on Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Etruscan Concerto for the MusicMasters label – powers a session that simultaneously referred to the original piece then transcended it.
Low Symphony wasn’t a note-for-note redo, in the style of those cloying takes on, say, Pink Floyd by the likes of the London Philharmonic (skip the so-so Us and Them on Philips, from the same era), but a borrowing of themes for inspiration.
“In practice,” Philip Glass wrote in liner notes for the now-defunct Point Music, “Bowie and Eno’s music certainly influenced how I worked, leading me to sometimes surprising musical conclusions. In the end, I think I arrived at something of a real collaboration between my music and theirs.”
For fans of the original, Glass presented an intriguing take on Bowie and Eno. For others, it was an entirely new synthesis of pop music and the orchestral – serious, but not overly; a variation in the truest, classical sense of the word … but with a very modern twist.
Philip Glass’ work is often insistent, even hypnotic, and rock music – specifically the oddly ambient sort occasionally produced during this period by David Bowie and Brian Eno – turned out to be a terrific creative launching pad: Three years later, Glass remade Bowie’s Heroes, then in 1997, he issued Music for Airports, a live, instrumental version of Brian Eno’s haunting long-player of the same name.
The feeling was mutual. Eno has described Philip Glass’ dramatic approach to the classical genre as a “viscous bath of pure, thick energy,” saying it “was actually the most detailed music I’d ever heard. It was all intricacy, exotic harmonics.” You still hear all of that inside the Low Symphony.
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