![]() What seems at first to be static and repetitive is actually constantly in motion (slow motion, compared to the notes themselves, of which there are many) the music grabs you and drags you with it until you reach that trance-like state. His use of insistent, repetitive rhythmic figures is well charted what struck me in this performance was the way he uses harmony: a repeated arpeggio will change by a single note – perhaps just a semitone, somewhere in the middle of the chord – with the repeats getting your ear used to the new harmony before another single note change moves it on. Glass’ music is supremely effective at bringing you into a meditative, trance-like state. Satyagraha makes no attempt at being a biopic of Gandhi: its purpose is to cause its viewer/listener to meditate on the nature of heroic struggle, helped along the way by Glass’ music and by a series of fragmentary images of Gandhi’s fight, in his early life, for the human rights of the Indian community in South Africa. The Bhagavad Gita is a work of meditation, a dialogue in which Prince Arjuna is prepared by his God/mentor Krishna for the struggles he will face. The text, taken from the Bhagavad Gita, is in Sanskrit, generally rendered without surtitles, the narrative is fragmentary and non-linear (you need the programme notes to understand it) and the characters – other than the principal figure of Gandhi himself – are something of a blur.īefore you start, therefore, you need to reset your expectations of what an opera is and does. ![]() ![]() For an opera lover in the prima le parole mould, where narrative, characterisation and poetry are at the core of the experience, Philip Glass’ Satyagraharequires, to put it mildly, some realignment.
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