Heck, where have I been? Many apologies for being MIA for so long. A lot has been going on - trips to LA and Montreal for work, a couple of snowboarding trips to Tahoe being big time-eaters. I’ve been meaning on doing a number of posts during this down-time, but for whatever reason, I kept getting distracted. Needless to say, that while a good number of folks were nice enough to send in their thoughts to help with the redesign of this blog - I just haven’t had the time to get to that (not sure when that’s going to be, but it’s definitely on the list!).

It’s almost comical how things have gotten in the way - for instance, I really wanted to write about seeing Philip Glass perform “Koyaanisqatsi” in the Davies Symphony Hall, but leaving for Montreal the next morning and not having ‘net access for the vast majority of the time while up there (despite having forked out an additional fee to Sprint to make sure that I’d be covered up there) put a damper on that one. But now that I find myself with a little bit of time before heading to the ‘Store, at least I can fill you guys in on that.

In short, it was a great performance. I had never seen Philip Glass Ensemble perform before, nor had I actually seen the film - despite having the soundtrack from Jim’s recommendation so many, many years ago. I was really hoping that they would make good use of the resident Ruffatti pipe organ (largest concert hall organ in the US!), but unfortunately they didn’t and instead relied upon synths for the organ tracks. Speaking of synthesizers, I have to confess some disappointment with some of the patch decisions as there were some definitely “cheesier” choices over the original recording (particularly strange since the film was released in 1983). From what I could tell, only the ominous vocal bellowing the name of the film in the beginning of the performance was pre-recorded - all other vocal performances seem to have been handled by the multitasking Ensemble.

Showing the film in conjunction with the performance really rounded out the experience. I’m not sure if it was a good idea for me to not have seen the film prior to the performance, since the weird “disconnected” feeling I got during the performance (and during my flights the next day) was a little distracting. That’s not to say that it’s something I regret or anything - just that I guess it was something I hadn’t anticipated. If you haven’t seen it before and are open to Glass’s minimalist compositions as well as plotless documentaries (for a laugh, check out Wikipedia’s plot spoiler warning), I definitely recommend it. Just don’t expect a shiny popcorn experience - it’s certainly a thought-provoking (and a bit of a downer, honestly).

Many, many thanks to Jim for not only introducing me to Glass, but for making sure I didn’t miss this performance. It was cutting it a little close with my business trip to Montreal, but I’m really happy that it worked out that the only performance I was able to catch was this one. Admittedly, it would’ve been nice to see the entire trilogy of films, but maybe I’ll get lucky and have the chance to see the whole thing another time.