Louis Glass symphonies

[eschiss1]

I see that the Danish Royal Library has uploaded digital copies of quite a few Glassworks (sorry to the language, if not to Philip Glass who also likes the term), including the autographs of at least his symphonies 1, 2, 4 and 6 in full score (to rex.kb.dk.)

[vesteel]

Louis Glass has some good symphonies! His Third and Fifth are my personal favorites (coincidentally they're also the ones that haven't been digitized...  )

[eschiss1]

The fifth is available @ IMSLP and my local library has a full score of no.3 which I could try to scan (I'm not good at it but.)

[JimL]

Great news! Now if only someone would clean up the score of his VC and digitize it! The copy at IMSLP is the MS, probably in need of editing.

[matesic]

Vesteel took the words out of my mouth. I only started investigating them a week ago but the named symphonies 3 and 5 I think deserve much wider exposure. Nos 2 and 4 I find somewhat overblown and (paradoxically?) less impressive. 1 and 6 await judgement.

[semloh]

Just a reminder that the Louis Glass symphonies can all be heard on YouTube.

[eschiss1]

It may be that for the least known of them it will be good to have the cpo recordings for comparison, eventually...

[Ilja]

If any of you have overlooked it, and if you are fond of Louis Glass's symphonies, I urge you to sample Barry Wordsworth's recording of the 3rd, "Wood Symphony" (1901) with the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, which Justin was so kind to post in the Downloads forum.

It's a really good version of my favourite Glass symphony, and quite different from Raiskin's recent one on cpo. Where Wordsworth has the orchestra articulate very precisely in the opening movement and takes a more atmospheric approach in the finale, Raiskin approaches it exactly the other way around. Personally, I think Wordsworth works better, the more so since he doesn't rush the scherzo in the same way as Raiskin does. The Andante (I wouldn't really call it a "slow movement" though) is also fine in both; the cpo engineers place the oboist much more up front, though. A while ago we only had the rather scruffy Todorov, and I'm glad that now two really good recordings of this piece exist.*

* and yes, there's Downes on what I think was a bit of an off-day.