In the booklet notes for the first recording of this opera, on the old CBS Masterworks label, Philip Glass states ''there is one important distinction between pop musicians and concert musicians; I think it's the only important distinction. When you talk about concert musicians, you're talking about people who actually invent language. They create values, a value being a unit of meaning that is new and different. Pop musicians package language.''
Leaving aside for a moment the blatant inadequacies of this theory (people like Zappa, Hendrix and Captain Beefheart certainly created new and enormously influential musical languages), what this new recording does is make even more explicit the roots of Glass's own inspiration in this work through its increased refinement and attention to detail. The original recording, as Glass comments in the new version's booklet, suffered from the crudity of the synthesized sound and the performers' ability to play the score accurately. ''We were on a limited budget, so we had to hire singers who could also move and dancers who could also sing. Our chorus this time around is far superior to that on the first recording. Moreover synthesizer technology has improved so enormously that we are able to create a more beautiful, sensual sound that we could have dreamed of in 1978.''One of the decidedly new elements in the original recording was that clearly artificial synthesizer sound, its awkwardness and its interesting clashes with the natural sounds created by the acoustic musicians in the group. This distracted the ear from the methods of music-making borrowed from non-Western sources (not just India—there are plenty of rhythmic and textural echoes of Indonesian and other South-East Asian musics) which are at the heart of this music. To call this a new language is to mislead: Einstein on the Beach re-packages pre-existing musical languages and syntaxes in precisely the way he defines pop music as doing. On the new recording, he does it more exquisitely and with an increased assurance, and so the overall listening experience is less alarming and more caressing than before (you also get more of what was originally a five-hour work—36 minutes more of it, in fact), but it moves perceptively closer to its own source.
Similarly, the increased effectiveness in the dichotomy between spoken text and instrumental accompaniment points up its close affinity with so much of the poetry-and-music experiments (both serious and absurdist) from the past 80 years, and ultimately its relationship to the opera recitative of Mozart's and Rossini's time. Glass is putting these forms into new jars, but the wine is essentialy old. And the oldest form used here is also the most prevalent: dance. Still: music for dancing at least has its heart in the right place, and that's an important point to consider when passing your own judgement on just what Glass and his ensemble has achieved here, both first and second time around.
So, where does that leave us? I cannot imagine that this new Philip Glass Ensemble recording of the opera will win many converts to Glass, but I can imagine that it will give a great deal of extra pleasure to those who were taken with the 1978 incarnation. It makes little sense to recommend the new recording as being better than the old, but one can certainly recommend it to those interested as being different and therefore equally worthy of a listen.'