Philip Glass: The Hours / Distant Figure

Artists Details both for the original “(The) Hours” & for “ The Hours / Distant Figure”:
Philip Glass, Composer
Anton Batagov, Piano
Philip Glass, Composer

The success of Philip Glass’s music to Stephen Daldrey’s 2002 film The Hours has spawned several recordings of the piano suite based on the eponymous soundtrack. One could literally spend hours listening to them all. They range from the more objective, ‘minimalist’ approach of Glass Ensemble stalwart Michael Riesman on the original recording (Orange Mountain, 2004), foregrounding rhythmic precision and dynamic control, to highly expressive, freer and more idiosyncratic interpretations by pianists such as Jeremy Limb (Quartz, 3/14), Valentina Lisitsa (Decca, 6/15) and Nicolas Horvath (Grand Piano, 2016). The Russian pianist Anton Batagov manages to strike an effective balance between the two on this recording, which also features Glass’s most recent composition for solo piano, the passacaglia-like Distant Figure (2017).

In the hands of performers less attuned to the needs of Glass’s film score, the swaying three-against-two (or six-against-four) motion between the two hands in ‘The Poet Acts’ from The Hours often becomes clunky and mannered. However, Batagov’s subtle rhythmic inflections serve to mirror the music’s inner drama and tension. This also enables the pianist to set up powerful and dramatic contrasts later on, and it is this ability to shape the music’s dynamic and expressive curve that marks out Batagov’s playing, as heard in more block-like, multi-sectional movements such as ‘Tearing Herself Away’ and ‘The Hours’. Both of these state and develop thematic ideas across larger timespans. The latter, in a version that is ‘reorchestrated’ by the pianist, provides the soundtrack with an almost Lisztian denouement – a dramatic cry for help made to sound even more powerful for having been largely suppressed up until that point.

https://www.discogs.com/release/13763172-Anton-Batagov-Philip-Glass-The-Hours-Distant-Figure

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/glass-the-hours-distant-figure-batagov