Glass: Symphony No. 3 and Hours Suite – Manson

Some slow movements announce themselves. This one just arrives, the way weather changes, and by the time you notice what’s happening it already owns you.

I’m talking about the Andante of the Symphony No. 3, and I’ll get to it — but first, credit where due. Michael Riesman’s piano-concerto redaction of the Hours score is a genuinely clever piece of repurposing. Riesman has been arranging for Glass since the Ford administration, more or less. He joined the Ensemble in 1974, produced the film score itself, knows this material the way a tailor knows a suit he’s altered a dozen times. What he’s done here is turn incidental music into something with real symphonic shape: a short orchestral preamble, then the piano takes over, and the two outer sections build to climaxes that earn the word. It works as a concerto. It doesn’t feel like leftovers reheated for the concert hall.

Riesman plays it himself, and there’s an unforced authority to his touch. Those repeated arpeggiated figures, which could turn to porridge in less careful hands, stay lucid, voiced with a pianist’s ear rather than a minimalist technician’s. Nobody’s going to confuse Glass’s writing with Chopin, but within the idiom Riesman finds shading — degrees of pressure in the attack, places where he leans on a note a fraction longer than the metronome would allow. Twenty-four minutes go by and you don’t check your watch.

But the reason to buy this disc is the symphony, and specifically its slow movement.

The Third opens cryptically: a set of short movements for solo strings that function almost like preludes, gestures whose full meaning only becomes clear in retrospect. Fine, absorbing, a little abstract. Then the Andante arrives and the piece becomes something closer to devotional music. Violas and cellos state a few chords, plainly, almost severely. Nothing happens for a while, deliberately. Then the double basses creep in underneath, one violin enters above, then two, then the whole section, until the strings are blooming in what feels like extreme slow motion, a chord progression opening like a time-lapse film of a flower no one asked to see filmed that way. Somehow it’s devastating. I’ve called it Pachelbel’s Canon’s evil twin before and I’ll stand by that: same accretive logic, same stepwise inevitability, but where Pachelbel radiates Baroque contentment, Glass here sounds like grief remembering itself.

The finale that follows is pure propulsion, brass and rhythmic ostinati that wouldn’t sound out of place scoring a chase through Istanbul in a Bond picture, and I mean that as description, not insult. Glass knows exactly what kind of music he’s writing there and does it superbly.

This makes three recordings now of the Third Symphony on disc, and the field is worth sorting out. Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra made the pioneering version. Davies has been Glass’s most consistent orchestral advocate for decades, and his account of the opening movement has an assertiveness, a rhythmic bite, that’s hard to beat. Marin Alsop’s Bournemouth release is polished, well-engineered, a little more symphonic in scale and correspondingly a touch less transparent. This new account, with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra under Anne Manson, splits the difference and then wins outright in the two movements that matter most. The engineering sits the microphones close, and the chamber-sized ensemble, properly scaled, unlike some “chamber orchestra” recordings that cheat toward bigger string sections, lets every contrapuntal thread register distinctly. In the Andante this pays enormous dividends: you can track each entering violin line rather than experiencing the buildup as an undifferentiated wash. Manson’s finale has a whip-crack energy that Alsop doesn’t quite match and that even Davies, whose first movement I still slightly prefer, doesn’t surpass.

I didn’t realize until several hearings in that this recording began life as a live broadcast. No audience noise, no distracting rustle, no wayward cough at the crucial pianissimo. Just an unusually vivid, unusually disciplined interpretation that happens to have been caught in one sustained take rather than assembled from patches. That’s a tribute to Manson’s control under pressure, and to an orchestra playing well above its regional profile.

Buy it for the symphony. Keep it for that ten minutes in the middle.