Prom 41: Alexa Mason (soprano), Anoushka Shankar (sitar), Ravichandra Kulur (bansuri), Gaurav Mazumdar (sitar), Britten Sinfonia / Karen Kamensek (above)

Philip Glass & Ravi Shankar Passages (1989-90)

Royal Albert Hall, Tuesday 15 August 2017 (late night)

You can listen to this Prom here

Passages is a good, old fashioned piece of classical crossover as it really should be, an example of just how well different forms of music can feed from each other if the composers are flexible and like-minded about their project.

Philip Glass was certainly enthusiastic on discovering the music of Ravi Shankar in Paris in 1965, laying the roots for a collaboration between the two, finally engineered by Private Music in 1989. The result was the intriguing Passages, an hour-long work that sits squarely between the two in terms of style. It is a ‘to me, to you’ work, each composer finishing the other’s thoughts in full musical clothing.

Initially on hearing the strains of Offering and Sadhanipa, however, you might have wondered if the two composers actually met in the construction of the piece. Offering is so irrefutably ‘Glassy’ in style, bubbling beneath the surface before moving into those persuasive cross rhythms he executes so effectively, but it has extra colour in the orchestration to mark it out. Likewise, Sadhanipa stands out with its use of the rich timbres of the Eastern instruments brought in by Shankar as part of the fusion.

Gradually the sounds come together, the distinctive figurations of Shankar complementing the rigorous methods of Glass, and taming them attractively when appropriate. To experience this at the Proms was a treat indeed, the ever-flexible Britten Sinfonia sitting centre stage but often in thrall to the group of musicians positioned on their left, led by Shankar’s daughter Anoushka (below).

Hers was a particularly captivating presence, the sounds from her sitar at once alluring and lovingly wrought, a complement to the superb string playing of Jackie Shave and her Britten cohorts. Soprano Alexa Mason deserves a mention for her floated yet penetrating delivery above the textures in Channels and Winds, while the brass and woodwind were particularly strong in the passages where Glass asks for a more mechanised approach. Meetings Along The Edge was particularly powerful because of this.

The score was full of colourful surprises, which the audience lapped up, and did not suffer for the ‘bar lines’ introduced by conductor Karen Kamensek for the necessity of concert performance. Happily this did not rein the music in, for it was clearly intensively rehearsed, and the Britten Sinfonia players, no strangers to playing music across cultural and artistic borders, responded to the contours of Shankar’s melodies and the clear direction of Kamensek as naturally as they did for the Glass elements.

The resulting collaboration may be a little on the episodic side, but Passages is never less than intriguing, and in this late night performance its qualities were very much to the fore in music that pulsed and shimmered before our very eyes.

One gripe – it would have been nice to credit the orchestral players in the program. Great though it is to have a free and colourful document of the occasion, it seems a shame not to name the players responsible for helping make this night a memorable one.

Ben Hogwood

You can hear the original recording of Passages on the Spotify link below: