Violinist Angèle Dubeau records her second album of Philip Glass covers with the ensemble La Pietà.

Angèle Dubeau is a Canadian classical violinist. In 1997 she founded the all-female string ensemble La Pietà. In addition to their extensive classical repertoire, Dubeau and La Pietà frequently turn to contemporary music, sometimes dedicating entire albums to contemporary composers such as Max Richter, Ludovico Einaudi, Arvo Pärt, John Adams or Alex Baranowski. Or Philip Glass, whose album Portrait: Philip Glass was released in 2008. Fifteen years after that first foray into Glass’ music, Dubeau and La Pietà have recorded a second album dedicated to the Baltimore composer, Philip Glass Signature, on the Analekta label (owned by her husband, François-Mario Labbé).

Dubeau has written that after publishing Portrait: Philip Glass, “I wanted to take a deeper dive into the vast œuvre of this composer, an icon of our era and one whose work has and will long continue to have impact. For many years now his fascinating and captivating music has been nourishing me intellectually and musically.
Glass being one of the most prolific of composers, there was no shortage of works to include on this my 48th album. My selection approach remains the same; I choose those works I find significant and compelling. Like Glass’ work as a whole, the content of this album is very diverse: music for theatre and for cinema, for chamber and for symphony orchestra, and recent works as well as some written almost 50 years ago!”
This time the album opens with the oldest work on the disc, Opening from Glassworks, and includes pieces from Metamorphosis, Koyaanisqatsi, Piano Quintet “Annunciation”, Les enfants terribles, A Brief History of Time (the soundtrack to the 2015 Errol Morris film), Bent (from Sean Mathias’ 1997 film), two of the Duets for violin and cello (numbers 1 and 4), Tea Time (written with the Gambian Foday Musa Suso), Candyman (Clive Barker’s 1992 film soundtrack), the Sonata for violin and piano, or the fourth movement of Symphony No. 3.