MUSIC

Phillip Glass: Symphony No. 12 “Lodger”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2023
8:00 PM

Carnegie Hall
881 Seventh Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan

$56-$56
TICKETS + INFORMATION

Quite the program from Dennis Russell Davies and the Filharmonie Brno (an excellent band). Phillip Glass completes his cycle of symphonies based on David Bowie’s (and Brian Eno’s) Berlin Triilogy with the last and least of the albums that comprise the trilogy, Lodger (unlike the previous two symphonies in the cycle, this one doesn’t take off from music in the album — understandably, since Lodger hews much more strictly to pop songform than the prior two installments of the trilogy — but rather resets lyrics from the album to new Glass music). So this symphony features a singer: Angélique Kidjo is neither here nore there (no, actually she’s “there”) — but Glass and Bowie, right?! The rest of program is music from the Brno orchestra’s fertile homeland: the great Janáček’s very famous Taras Bulba, and the good Martinu’s (I love much of his music myself — but I’m not making any great claims) virtually unknown (Martinu wrote A LOT of music, so MOST of it’s virtually unknown) Thunderbolt P-47.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: Unlikely (but deserving) hotspot Russian Samovar (I feel constrained to observe that this onetime dissident den has no connection to the depredations visited by what was then the Soviet Union on what was then Czechoslovakia).