Paul Esswood, Milagro Vargas, Melinda Liebermann, Tero Hannula, Helmut Holzapfel, Cornelius Hauptmann; Stuttgart State Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Dennis Russell Davies
CBS/Sony Masterworks M2K 42457; 2 CDs
Philip Glass’s Akhnaten is an opera about a man who tried to replace an entire civilization’s gods with a single god—and discovered that people do not surrender their old gods merely because a ruler has composed a beautiful hymn to a new one. It is an ideal subject for Glass. Few composers have been so fascinated by the visionary who stands apart from society, sustained by an idea powerful enough to change the world but not necessarily powerful enough to survive it.
The opera completes Glass’s trilogy of portraits that began with Einstein on the Beach and continued with Satyagraha. Einstein represents science, Gandhi politics, and Akhnaten religion. But Akhnaten is the most conventionally operatic of the three. It has identifiable characters, ceremonial confrontations, a rise and fall, and something resembling a tragic hero. It also contains some of the most immediately beautiful music Glass ever wrote.
The score’s peculiar darkness comes partly from Glass’s decision to dispense with violins. The upper strings are gone, leaving violas, cellos and double basses to provide a heavy, burnished foundation. Brass and percussion rise out of that foundation like architecture. The result is not an imitation of ancient Egyptian music—whatever that might mean—but an imagined ceremonial world: massive, formal and slightly unreal.
That sound is established in the Prelude. The orchestra does not hurry toward an event. It seems to construct a temple one repeated figure at a time. Harmonies accumulate, rhythms turn within rhythms, and apparently minor changes begin to feel momentous. Anyone who dismisses Glass as a composer who merely repeats himself should listen to what happens inside these repetitions. The surface may remain steady while the emotional pressure underneath it continually changes.
The “Funeral of Amenhotep III” is tremendous: stern brass, pounding percussion and choral writing with the weight of a public ritual. This is Glass at his most imposing. The music does not describe power from the outside; it makes us feel what it would be like to stand inside a society in which religion, government and spectacle are the same thing.
Against this monumental background, Paul Esswood’s Akhnaten sounds deliberately vulnerable. The countertenor voice immediately separates the pharaoh from everyone around him. Esswood does not try to turn the role into conventional operatic heroism. His Akhnaten is remote, gentle and strangely exposed, as if he already belongs more completely to his vision than to the physical world around him.
That quality is especially effective in the duet with Nefertiti. Milagro Vargas gives Nefertiti warmth and human presence, while Esswood retains his unearthly stillness. Their intertwining lines produce one of the opera’s most sensuous passages, although the sensuality is inseparable from ritual. Even love in this world seems to take place before an altar.
The celebrated “Hymn to the Sun” is the opera’s spiritual center. Here Akhnaten sings in the language of the audience rather than in Egyptian, Akkadian or biblical Hebrew. The change removes the historical distance. For a few minutes we are no longer examining the remains of a vanished civilization; we are listening directly to a man declare his faith. Esswood sings without inflated grandeur, allowing the simplicity of the melodic line to do the work. The effect is moving precisely because Glass refuses to underline it.
Dennis Russell Davies understands the scale and pacing of this music completely. He does not try to inject artificial drama by pushing the tempo or exaggerating every crescendo. He trusts the score’s long architectural spans. Under his direction, the Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra becomes the opera’s principal character. Singers may represent Akhnaten, Nefertiti and the Egyptian establishment, but it is the orchestra that represents history—the immense force that carries Akhnaten upward and eventually buries him.
The Stuttgart chorus is equally important. It can sound ceremonial, threatening or impersonal, often within the same scene. When the old order turns against Akhnaten, Glass does not need realistic stage violence. The music itself seems to withdraw its support. Patterns that once suggested divine inevitability become mechanisms of destruction.
This recording was made without a conventional violin section, yet it never sounds deprived of color. On the contrary, the restricted palette gives it an identity that many more lavishly orchestrated operas lack. The lower strings glow rather than merely brood, the winds add streaks of dry color, and the brass can sound either regal or brutal. The recorded sound has plenty of depth, although the voices occasionally appear set slightly behind the orchestra. In this particular opera, that balance feels appropriate.
Akhnaten is sometimes described as minimalist, but the label is more misleading than helpful. There is nothing minimal about the emotional or architectural scale of this work. It is grand opera constructed by different means: repetition instead of conventional development, accumulation instead of sudden revelation, ritual instead of psychological realism.
The opera ends not with Akhnaten restored to glory but with the ruins of his city being visited in the present day. The pharaoh who tried to abolish the old gods has himself become an archaeological object. Glass does not mock him for failing. The final pages possess an extraordinary tenderness. Akhnaten’s religion disappeared, his city was abandoned, and his name was nearly erased—but the longing that produced his vision remains understandable.
This first recording still makes the strongest possible case for the opera. Esswood’s fragile, otherworldly Akhnaten, Vargas’s humane Nefertiti and Davies’s command of the immense orchestral design combine to give the performance both grandeur and intimacy. It is one of Glass’s finest recordings and one of the essential operatic documents of the late twentieth century.
Rating: 5 out of 5
