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Music CD - Satyagraha
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Music CD: Satyagraha
List Price: $51.98
Our Price: $34.99
Your Save: $ 16.99 ( 33% )
Availability:
Manufacturer: Sony
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Tracks:
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1. Satyagraha: Scene 1
2. Satyagraha: Scene 2
3. Satyagraha: Scene 3
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0074643967228
Label: Sony
Manufacturer: Sony
Number Of Discs: 3
Publisher: Sony
Release Date: 1990-10-25
Studio: Sony
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: One of Glass's best works, unjustly relegated to the dustbin....
Comment: This was the first Glass CD I picked up, and I still find it immensely powerful and quite moving. It seems to divide long time Glass admirers, and honestly I don't know why. I feel an appreciation for Glass's earlier music, and I like the later stuff as well. I feel that this opera is one of his most majestic, moving ones. It usually gets dismissed by people as a "transitional" work, but it doesn't mean it's a lousy work. Many of the segments are truly outstanding, like the final third of the opening Scene 1-Tolstoy. When the orchestra starts to swirl right around the 11 minute mark (or so), then kicks into a startling powerful conclusion, to this day it gives me the shivers because it's so sincere and genuine. I also love the first scene in Act II-Tagore. It's not as powerful as Scene One-Act I-Tolstoy, but it's still hypnotic. This opera recently was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC in a brand new staging. I didn't get to see it (mucho dinero, and the cheap seats were all gone instantly), but if it ever comes back, I will, hell or high water, as I never had been to the opera before. I would love to see, arguably, my favorite of Glass's operatic works. I think this is better than Akhaten, and just as good (though not as radical) as the avant garde Einstein on the Beach.
I have never met a Philip Glass album I didn't like.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My favorite of Glass's works--powerful................
Comment: The subject in this beautifully, bizarre opera is the early life of Mahatma Gandhi and the text is a selection of verses from the Bhagavadgita, sung in the original Sanskrit and used as another strand in the complex repetitive web of sound. The result is undeniably repetitiveness, becoming static; a good deal of this conveys energy as well as power. The writing for the chorus is often thrilling, and individual characters emerge in only a shadowy way. The recording, using the device of over dubbing, is spectacular.
This is one of my favorites in the realm of "Glass" works.
Customer Rating:
Summary: spectacular
Comment: Spectacular. Profoundly moving. Spiritual. My favorite Glass work. Everyone should own this. Satyagraha, for me, is a sacred text.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A servicable recording of Glass's great theater piece
Comment: Revivals of Staygraha have been rare over the past twenty years or so, but the Met has announced that it will bring the work to New York next season, transferring a magnificent 2007 production from the English National Opera. The reviews here at Amazon say misleading things one way and another, but in general the praise for this extremely minimalist work is deserved. On stage Satygraha is mesmerizing and profound, but it is also peculiar. First of all, nothing sung by the soloists or chorus pertains to Gandhi. The entire text comes from the Baghavad-Gita, and although the selections aren't extensive, Glass stretches them out, syllable by syllable, to great length. Chords are rudimentary, diatonic, and highyly repetitive. Melodies exist in a simple form and become transfixing by repetition more than intrinsic beauty (For example, Gandhi sings a simple scale passage at the end of Act 3 for ten minutes without alteration).
The events onstage are not directly related to the text but come from the earliest period in Gandhi's life when he was fighting against the so-called Black Acts that drastically restricted the personal freedom of Indians in South Africa. Only five or six events are indicated, and not all are momentous. In one instance, for example, an angry crowd was held at bay when the wife of the chief of police showed up while Gandhi was out for a walk and shielded him with her parasol. This symbolic show of sympahty dispersed the crowd. Presiding over each of the three acts is an inspiring spiritual figure: Tolstoy for the first act, the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore for the second, and Martin LUther King, Jr. for hte third. These figures neither sing nor speak.
Although called an opera, in performance Satyagraha comes off as a meditative, emotionally sobering theater piece, a ritualized happening that in the London production uses extensive special effects and stage devices. The brunt of the solo singing falls on Gandhi, sung by a baritone in London but here by a fairly taxed tenor from the NY City Opera. Minimalism is hard to sing in general: at one point the male chorus must sing one syllable (ah-ah-ah-ah) hundreds of times quickly, in unison, and without taking a breath. Although the performers here are up to the task, they seem strained, and in many ways the artificially bright overdubbing of the orchestra produces a false sound. In live performance Satyagraha is dominated by slow string lines and quick, chirping woodwinds. The sonority is basic but rich, not thin and squeaky as heard here.
So, as much as I was engrossed in the staged version in London, I am mildly disappointed by this CD set. I also wonder how a listener who doesn't have the advantage of visuals will respond to long stretches of what seems like sonic wallpaper. Leavig those questions aside, Satyagraha repays listening and is one of Glass's most convincing achievements.
Customer Rating:
Summary: in 3rd place after Einstein and Akhnaten
Comment: My own personal entirely subjective ranking, if there must be such an abominable thing, places "Einstein on the Beach" as Glass's #1 opera, "Akhnaten" as #2, and "Satyagraha" as #3.
(I've never gotten much into any of his many subsequent operas; I have tried here and there, but they do not appeal to me yet; perhaps they will begin to reach me after a few more years).
That being said, Satyagraha is very very good. The music is an expansion into orchestral space, of his earlier trademark idioms. The singing is wonderful. The libretto is wonderful too.
I think it marks a turning point or watershed, because it was his first step towards turning away from being totally experimental and "new"; it was his first excursion (totally different than "Einstein") into large-scale use of the traditional opera technology, e.g. orchestra and trained operatic singers.
I think he then perfected this use, of the traditional opera orchestra and operatic singers, in "Akhnaten"; but "Satyagraha" is still very very good as I said.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Satyagraha remains, decades after its composition, one of Philip Glass's most traditional works. An emphasis on strings and on courtly, European-toned small choruses lends the opera a sense of musical familiarity rarely evidenced in the composer's extensive catalog. The libretto, though written in Sanskrit, is often mistakable, sonorously, for Italian. Satyagraha's relative independence from the internecine Indian raga-like patterns of the composer's other long-form work is particularly ironic given the opera's subject: Mahatma Ghandi, whose native country's ritual culture and spiritual heritage have long informed Glass's music. This is no dramatic biography; following a mythological gambit, the scenes focus on a handful of specific events in Ghandi's long life (the construction of a communal farm, his tumultuous arrival in Durban, the publication of the weekly broadside Indian Opinion). Pointedly, the opera is an international affair, each of its three acts referencing a major cultural figure: Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr. The music is most interesting when Glass draws parallels between his patented, minimalist patterns and standard classical mode. --Marc Weidenbaum
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