BBC SSO gives Philip Glass UK Premiere

• January 2012

  

  In the second part of Glasgow Music’s 75th Birthday celebration of composer Philip Glass, the BBC SSO will perform the UK Premiere of his Symphony No.6, ‘Plutonian Ode’, at Glasgow City Halls on 24 May under conductor Nicholas Collon. Commissioned to mark the composers 65th birthday, the Symphony takes its name and its libretto from beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s influential work Plutonian Ode.

  The celebration of Glass’ 75th Birthday is a core element of Glasgow Life’s Minimal festival, as he is one of the founding fathers of the Minimalist movement. Ginsberg’s poem on which the Symphony is based was his great ‘howl’ at the arms race of the 1960s, and the three movements of the symphony follow the arc of the poem: the first movement a passionate outcry against nuclear pollution, the second a turn towards healing, and the final movement a transformation. The Symphony is appropriately accompanied by Richard Strauss’s epic tone-poem of decay and rebirth, Death and Transfiguration.

  Ginsberg’s words are performed in this concert by Swedish soprano Ida Falk Winland, and the BBC SSO will be conducted by Nicholas Collon, founder of the Aurora Orchestra.

  Find out more and book tickets

• More stories

  • May 2012: The New Century
  • March 2012: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Season 2012/13