Glass Violin Concerto^a. Company. Akhnaten - Prelude; Dance ^aAdele Anthony vn Ulster Orchestra / Takuo Yuasa

Naxos R 8 554568 (52 minutes: DDD)

Quintessential Glass in performances that, generally, cut the mustard. The unearthly Violin Concerto is especially pleasing

There seems to me only one really 'bad' way to play Glass and that's to over-play him, press the tension or the tempo too far, lay on the vibrato or plough through a score with too many emphases. Takuo Yuasa for the most part steers a sensitive course between relaxation and animation, verging on the effortful only for the long Prelude to Glass's third opera Akhnaten, which sounds just a mite stiff-jointed. The shorter 'Dance' is rather better.

We're told that Company was 'originally used in staged soliloquy on the subject of death' and its four short, string-band movements are fairly characteristic. The middle movements mark the most obvious points of contrast, the second dancing to a lively ostinato, the third more fluid and lyrical.

Adele Anthony's version of the Violin Concerto parades a winsome musical personality in a sympathetic context. The overall mood might be daubed as 'melancholy mobility', highly atmospheric music located (hypothetically speaking) either at dawn or dusk. It's a deceptively simple piece that tends to haunt the memory, and this third CD encounter (not quite as distinctive as Kremer, and generally preferable to McDuffie) gave me much pleasure. Yuasa effects some telling diminuendos in the orchestral score, and while the percussion writing might have been better focused (the wood block especially - try from 3'57" into the first movement), viewed as a whole the performance is quietly effective. The sound quality is more than acceptable.