Les Enfants Terribles

This low-budget Philip Glass opera, Les enfants Terribles, is based on a novel and play by Jean Cocteau, forming the third ring in Glass' trilogy of works devoted to the elaborate personal mythology of the great French visionary. Foregoing the controversial and dualistic 1949 film of Les enfants Terribles made by Jean-Pierre Melville, Glass decided to realize the visual element through a collaboration with choreographer Susan Marshall, re-creating Cocteau's story as a "dance opera." Les enfants Terribles is the most compelling Glass score beheld in many years. Released by Glass' own Orange Mountain Music, the recording sounds like a rehearsal, with the voices of the principals -- soprano Christine Arand, mezzo-soprano Valerie Komer, bass-baritone Phillip Cutlip, and tenor Hal Cazalet -- drifting about in space as if though going through the motions of a play blocked out in a large dance studio. Glass eschews his patented orchestral scoring for a Les noces-esque rendering of the music for three pianos, played by Nelson Padgett, Eleanor Sandresky, and Glass himself. Glass' harmonies and patterns gain added strength and freshness played on multiple pianos with their combined sense of attack and percussive intensity, and avails himself of more pointed harmonic language here than is his usual wont. While Glass doesn't make a big noise about his time of study with Darius Milhaud (no one who did so does), his approach to the vocal writing in Les enfants Terribles is not dissimilar to Milhaud, side-stepping conventional melodic turns and tone painting to imbue Cocteau's French with a sort of harmonized speech. The total package grabs one's attention right away, and holds it throughout both of the discs in the set -- one is eager to move from the first to the second. This highly personal and well-realized work was recorded at about the time Elektra Nonesuch was putting out practically every note of music that Glass wrote. Perhaps the group decided to pass on this project; now the recording is nearly a decade old, and Glass has decidedly moved on to other things. Nonetheless, Nonesuch's loss is Orange Mountain Music's gain, and ours as well, as Les enfants Terribles is well worth going out of one's way to get. To those who think Glass lost his edge many years ago, take note. -Review by Uncle Dave Lewis