Review – New York Times – Philip Glass, Easy to Mimic but Hard to Match

“ On Saturday, at Roulette in Brooklyn, the pianists Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies reveled in a program of Mr. Glass’s piano music, about half of which had been adapted from the composer’s operas.

There wasn’t a single dud in this sparkling concert. A suite from “Les Enfants Terribles” showed how much expressive range these two longtime Glass interpreters can bring to his music, with an intoxicating sense of reverie in “Elizabeth Chooses a Career.”
On Ms. Namekawa and Mr. Davies’s 2005 recording of this suite, the more aggressive movements had a metronomic tinge. On Saturday, that studied feeling was gone, replaced by a booming sound that allowed the music to breathe between peaks of intensity. Their approach to the 2008 piece “Four Movements for Two Pianos” also seems to have taken on greater texture over the years.

The program also included a 2013 miniature, “Stokes,” as well as excerpts from two stage works, “The Voyage” and “Orphée.” The latter, like “Les Enfants Terribles,” was inspired by the work of Jean Cocteau. More than Vivaldi, this French poet and filmmaker can reliably spur Mr. Glass’s harmonic imagination, and his agile humor — the attributes that make him both easy to mimic and difficult to match.”