"American Four Seasons": The Second Philip Glass Violin Concerto

I'm not sure what is "American" about Philip Glass's "The American Four Seasons," his second violin concerto*. For that matter, I'm not sure which season is which, though my guess is that it begins in spring and ends in winter. Apparently, Glass and the violinist Robert McDuffie for whom he wrote it (after years of prodding) postulate different programs, McDuffie thinking the second movement winter and Glass summer. (Presuming the seasons are in order, Glass provides support for my guess, summer following spring. Whatever season, the second movement is achingly beautiful, and considerably longer than the others.)

And what is the America for the "American seasons"? Glass has suggested San Diego, which many people consider as not having seasons (or having two, with a short rainy season and some fog in summer). McDuffie premiered the concerto in Toronto (last December), which definitely does have seasons (including humid summers and the seemingly endless slush of winter). I'd think that in a concession to English Canadian sensibilities, it would have been called "North American seasons."

Though McDuffie is playing the concerto with many North American symphony orchestras (sometimes on a program with the Barber concerto, sometimes with Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"), the premiere recording has the London Philharmonic, led by the American(ist) champion of Samuel Barber, Marin Alsop. In San Francisco, McDuffie played the concerto on his 1735 Guarneri del Gesu violin with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, on a program that also included (Venetian) Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Glass replaced the harpsichord in Vivaldi's orchestra(tion) with a synthesizer.

Vivaldi called his "Four Seasons," "the Contest between Harmony and Invention." Glass does not really do harmony (and some wonder about his inventiveness). At least the first three movements for orchestra and violin sound like passacaglias as to me, that is, having a bass line repeated over and over as a foundation for the lyrical solo lines. Mostly the bass line belongs to cellos rather than basses. I have to grant that the third season shifts from one bass line to another and back, so technically is not a passacaglia.

In addition to the four movements for violin and orchestra, there are four shorter "songs" for solo violin. These have fairly numerous double-stops, but are not especially virtuosic showpieces. Glass thought that the four "songs" could be detached to make a solo violin recital piece... in compensation for not providing a cadenza (though violinists have often concocted their own cadenzas for mainstays of the violin repertoire like the Beethoven violin concerto).

In addition to being able to listen multiple times to a part or the whole of a new piece, CDs allow skipping tracks, so I have been able to listen to the four solo violin songs in succession. I do not hear any development across them, but each is sonorous and the brief penultimate one faster and more virtuosic than the others, with prominent double stops (more reminiscent of Bach's solo parititas than Vivaldi composition). It also leads well into the more agitated third season (autumn by my reckoning), which is also a movement that sounds rather standard-issue Philip Glass music. I'm not wild about the ending of the concerto, but generally can bask in the very lyrical music of the songs and of the seasons.

Vivaldi has been denigrated for writing the same violin concerto four hundred times, and Glass's prolific output that often sounds the same may be the Vivaldi of our day in a less positive sense than McDuffie intended. Both composers loved arpeggios and repeated bass lines under lyrical treble ones. If there are any direct melodic homages in Glass's concerto, I missed them.

McDuffie has also recorded the first Glass violin concerto, written in 1987. That recording is on Telarc. The second is on the Orange Mountain Music label. I have to say that 40 minutes for a full-priced "classical" (postmodernist, postminimalist) disc is disappointing. There's no shortage of Philip Glass music that could have been included on a disc!

*One possibility is the use of clave rhythms, though the five-strike clave is prototypically Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian, widely considered to derive from African bell patterns.

Tracks and Timings

Prologue 1:33
Movement I 6:02
Song No. 1 4:15
Movement II 10:29
Song No. 2 1:37
Movement III 5:58
Song No. 3 3:13
Movement IV 7:00

Total: 40 minutes