Spanish pianist Fabio Álvarez performs at the International Institute of Madrid presenting “Mad Rush”, his album with music by Philip Glass.
Spanish pianist Fabio Álvarez (Orense, 1988) will perform tomorrow, Friday, at 8 p.m. at the International Institute (Miguel Ángel, 8), the American cultural centre founded in Madrid in 1903, as part of a series of activities, mainly lectures, aimed at raising awareness of the minimalist music movement, given that on 17 April the Teatro Real in Madrid will host the Spanish premiere of Nixon in China, the minimalist opera by John Adams. Álvarez trained at Musikene, the higher conservatory of Music of Basque Country (north of Spain), and specialised in contemporary repertoire before travelling to New York and continuing his training at the Manhattan School of Music, obtaining the highest qualification as Master of Music under the tutelage of the renowned pianist and pedagogue Philip Kawin.
His stay in New York lasted six and a half years, during which time he got to work personally with George Crumb, with whom he prepared his first recording project, Musical Zodiac: Makrokosmos I & II, in 2018. At the end of 2022 he released on the IBS Classical label his second album, Mad Rush, this one devoted entirely to the performance of pieces by Philip Glass.
I imagine that the concert you are going to give tomorrow, Friday, at the International Institute is a performance of your album Mad Rush.
Yes, it will be. In full.
Why did you choose the particular pieces on the album?
Mad Rush, which is the title of both Friday’s programme and the album, represents for me an almost literal description of what New York is like. I mean, it’s a piece of extremes, of slow parts and fast, loud parts. And New York is a city of total extremes, where you find everything from the most beautiful places to rubbish littering the pavement, the ultimate luxury and people littering the streets. That energy, the very famous New York energy, is reflected, for me, in this piece. Then there are four of Philip Glass’s twenty piano etudes. I made a selection of the ones that I have the most affinity with, also alternating slow and fast, slow and fast, and I chose Étude No. 2, 6, 5 and 9, to alternate things and give a bit of shape to the set. Then there’s Wichita Vortex Sutra, which is based on an anti-war poem by Allen Ginsberg from 1966 which, unfortunately, is back in the news again because of the war in Ukraine, and which Ginsberg wrote against the war in Vietnam. Finally there is the Trilogy Sonata, which is in three movements, each movement belonging to one of Glass’s “portrait” operas, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten, with Einstein being the first portrait, Mahatma Ghandi the second and Pharaoh Akhenaten the third. With this selection I also wanted to make a kind of portrait of Glass, so that anyone who knows him can get an idea of who Glass is from this album. Obviously there is a lot of material missing from quartets and many other things, but I think you can hear several different facets of the composer, both from his operas and from the studies he composed for himself, to improve as a pianist.
At the end of the album I did a little transcription for piano and narrator of one of the “knees” of Einstein on the Beach, in which I am also the narrator of that fragment of text in which a story is told about two lovers who are on a bench under the moonlight… Because among the things that New York has given me was also my wife. It was there that I met her, even though we are now living together in Madrid. When I heard that piece it reminded me a bit of my history and I thought it was very interesting to be able to do with that piece the same thing that has been done on many occasions with Wichita Vortex Sutra, which has been performed many times while declaiming the poem at the same time.
Just as you were able to do with George Crumb, who passed away last year, but with whom you worked before recording the album about his work, have you been able to work on Mad Rush with Glass?
No. I’ve tried by all human means but, at the moment, he’s a composer who, although he’s very old, is still very, very busy, with a lot of projects going on at the same time and his music is being played a lot everywhere… and there are many of us performers who have tried to reach him and it hasn’t been possible, although obviously I’d be fascinated to meet him, of course. Meeting a composer of Crumb’s stature and seeing that he was a very humble person, who didn’t mind working with a young and eager pianist, was also very stimulating.
What was the first thing you heard of Philip Glass and at what age?
I think the first thing, to be honest, would probably be the soundtrack to The Truman Show, which he composed.
I don’t remember when I saw the film, but I might have been, I don’t know, fourteen or fifteen years old. And what I do remember was looking for the soundtrack of the film, to play it on the piano. Nowadays, in many concerts, I include Truman Sleeps as an encore. That was the first thing. The next thing I got to know I think was Einstein on the Beach and from there I got a bit more into his piano music, the Études for Piano or the Wichita Vortex Sutra, which is also one of my favourite pieces and definitely Mad Rush and his Metamorphosis, which I loved. I think they’re fantastic, although I couldn’t include them on this album because it was too much…
When I went to see Akhnaten at the Metropolitan Opera House it marked a before and after. To see Glass’s music live, in a huge production, regardless of the length of an opera of several hours, was, for me, fantastic, an incredible musical experience. That’s when I decided that I had to record his music, that I needed to. Also, one thing I really like to do is to record the recording projects as monographs of a composer, so that people can find these projects through the composer. If you don’t know me, it’s difficult for people to look for Fabio Álvarez, but there’s a very good chance that they’ll look for Philip Glass and find my album through the composer. And then they will know me as a pianist.
You are a concert pianist and it has always struck me that in the world of classical music, Philip Glass is not despised, but he is undervalued and pejoratively labelled as a “pop musician”. In your dimension as a concert pianist, what does Philip Glass mean to you?
There are always composers who are more liked and others who are less liked. In Glass’s world, it’s true that there are quite a few people who may have that opinion. But, curiously, it also happened with a composer like George Crumb, whose music investigates timbre and extended piano techniques a lot, and I also met many pianists or classical musicians who didn’t like that kind of sonority either. The same thing happens with Glass, but from another point of view, and I think that this happens, in my humble opinion, because of the simplicity of his material. That is to say, if we analyse a Philip Glass score from the outset, it is very simple on a harmonic level. It has no virtuoso parts either…
… It is not Rachmaninov.
But Glass doesn’t compose for that purpose. For me, Glass is working on something very different: the dimension of time. He doesn’t like to be called a minimalist composer, he prefers to be called a composer of repeated structures. And these repeated structures, with very specific and very selected melodic material, create a different sensation in the listener than if they only heard that material once. That is to say, just as in life, sometimes we need things to be repeated four times for us to understand them or for them to stick in our heads. It happens in this music too, and when we listen to a track or a chord or whatever for four times, when we get new material, that feeling of getting new material is different. Glass, for me, goes beyond what the notes and harmony are. It offers a broader overall feeling. Obviously there is a timbral expression, rhythmic expression and many other things. On the other hand, let’s not forget that Glass is a very, very well-trained composer and a gentleman. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he studied Indian music with Ravi Shankar. He studied at Juilliard. He has many, many, many top level awards and his music is consumed at a very high level. I remember going to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to see his opera Akhnaten and it was packed. And this is true of many other things of his. We enter into the realm of taste and I understand that there are people who may like it more or less, and that’s all respectable.
I’ve been lucky enough to interview Philip Glass on three occasions and on one of them he even told me that he doesn’t give a damn about posterity…
(Laughs). There is also an interview in which he commented that sometimes people would come up to him and tell him that they listen to his works and that no matter how much they listen to them they can’t understand them or enjoy them, and he would tell them, “well, listen to something else” (laughs). I’m passionate about Glass and the same thing happens to me with Crumb. And they are both people with whom the same thing happens as with Debussy: you listen to them and you know it’s Debussy, Crumb or Glass. It’s hard to get confused. They have a very strong personality and a very marked style and that appeals to me, as a pianist, very much. I’m also a person of extremes, and from a completely atonal Crumb, with extended techniques, with new material in practically every bar, I’ve gone to Glass, with something that on a harmonic level is super simple. Even on a visual level: if we compare a Crumb score with a Glass score, they are like night and day. I think we artists have to publish in order to expand our repertoire. There is so much repertoire and it’s so vast that I think recording… I don’t know, Chopin’s Nocturnes again or all this kind of stuff that has been recorded so many and so many times and played so many and so many times, doesn’t make sense. Today’s pianists also have to open up horizons and show people that there is a lot of music and a lot of composers and that it is really very interesting music of very high quality.
I’m glad to hear that, because I’m not a musician and I have no musical training of any kind and I can’t refute anyone musicologically. And I have also interviewed a great Spanish conductor and it annoys me that, for example, when I told him what Glass said about posterity, he replied that he didn’t believe he would go down in posterity either. On the other hand, it also bothers me that on the side of the more avant-garde musicians, they always opt for Steve Reich over Philip Glass. I like Reich too, but I don’t understand the animosity towards Glass. It’s like that old confrontation between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: the Beatles are the popular ones, but the Rolling Stones are the cool ones.
I understand perfectly what you’re saying, because it’s the same for me. Besides, I can understand whether you like a composer more or not, but one thing is whether you like him more or less and another thing is whether he is good or not good, or whether he is a good composer or not a good composer, or whether his music is good or not good. We are talking about a composer who is very well known, whose operas are performed in the best opera houses in the world, whose music is played by the Kronos Quartet or Yuja Wang.