In January 2020 I discussed here Philipp Glass - Musical Offering, a collection of piano pieces performed by Dutch pianist and Glass expert Feico Deutekom.
It is music that has a relatively long reception history in our country, dating back to 1975, when in June the Philip Glass Ensemble from New York made its first appearance at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw as part of the Holland Festival. I no longer remember the exact date, but I do remember being there and that the hall was mostly filled with young people. After the performance, exclusively enthusiastic reactions to this 'minimal music' in a mixture of Western and Eastern sounds, with here and there a hint of American jazz and - actually also 'minimal' - a touch of Erik Satie. A veritable melting pot of styles that is, however, relatively easy to identify by the absence of complex layering
Feico Deutekom and Philip Glass (photo Janiek Dam)
That Feico Deutekom has become fascinated by Glass's compositions and that the composer greatly values him as an interpreter of his work is beyond any doubt. The Dutch pianist collaborated with Glass in 2019 on Musical Offering (according to the notes in the cd booklet it was in 2020, but that cannot be correct in my view, since the recording dates from June 2019). Now then the Etudes, not all twenty in chronological order, but eleven in an arrangement chosen by Deutekom himself, according to his own account in order to bring forward new connections, contrasts and perspectives and thereby present a new narrative.
In Deutekom's accompanying letter, there was a clear sense that the Etudes had already been recorded and released multiple times and the bar was accordingly set quite high. As it also expressed the hope that he had managed to find a balance between structure and mechanical character on the one hand, and the lyricism and emotion of the longer lines on the other. Between mathematics and poetry, so to speak.
Deutekom has certainly succeeded in this undertaking: you are in for his fascinating exploration of this study work, by a Glass specialist on a perfectly intonated and tuned Steinway D, whose sound was brilliantly captured by Jakko van der Heijden (he runs his own Zefir label in Middelburg).