Considered in isolation from Martin Scorsese’s new film on the life of the Dalai Lama, Philip Glass’s score takes on a peculiar life beyond the composer’s intentions. On the one hand, the 18 tracks are inevitably fragmentary. Glass, of course, has to bear the cross of being a successful composer of film scores (among many other things) while producing some of his most interesting work when given the opportunity to use the extended, uninterrupted time-spans afforded by such genres as opera, conventional classical structures such as the symphony or string quartet, or the four-hour Music in 12 Parts.
What can be said in favour of this recording, however, is the intriguing triumph of content over a necessarily restricting form. This kind of artistic subterfuge is of course nothing new. In this case Glass – Buddhist, student of Tibetan culture and a skilled and stylistically confident composer – has synthesized an elegant techno-ethno musical mixture from all these elements which seamlessly knits Tibetan religious music, with its extraordinary wind and percussion sonorities, into his own distinctive musical idiom. It’s worth buying this disc just to hear how he does it. Roger Thomas