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The Australian - Concert Review The Australian, Monday January 15, 1996, by Laurie Strachan. TRANSPARENT LACK OF IDEAS The Sydney Festival publicity brochure describes Philip Glass as "the most successful living composer in the world". If you define success as being performed a lot, then Glass is indeed highly successful. Thousands of people like listening to his music and going to his operas. On Friday night his appearance as solo performer at the piano was enough to pack the Opera House Concert Hall to the rafters and his entrance on stage to elicit a cheer of grand final proportions. So far, so good; but when the printed program for the recital carries an article with a sub-heading "Wagner and Philip Glass: Two of a Kind", in which Glass draws parallels between his work and Wagner's, we are witnessing serious delusions of grandeur. Judged by Friday night's offerings, Glass is quite simply not to be considered in the same breath as Wagner -- or any other of the pantheon of composers who, at various stages in the development of music, have mastered its craft and then gone on to broaden its scope. Here is no giant of music but a man with few musical ideas and a sadly limited technical ability to exploit them. Seen and heard in the stark light of a piano recital, his music comes across as drab and unimaginative, musical porridge. Its main selling point seems to be that it is inoffensive and easy to listen to - that is unless you find its dearth of ideas, its tedious repetitiveness and its shallow emotional depth, all masquerading as serious music, in themselves offensive. Glass's idea of complexity seems to be to take a chord and turn it into an arpeggio, his idea of development to repeat it ad nauseam with tiny variations in its decorations. There is no tension (and therefore no release), the range of expression is absurdly stunted and the pianism elementary. At times it was difficult not to laugh out loud as he solemnly crossed his right hand over his left (which was usually doing a little dah-dee, dah-dee figure in the middle bass) and struck a portentous note in the deeper bass. Liszt would have corpsed himself. Six works were played, of which only the penultimate, Six Etudes, showed any sign of an attempt to develop ideas. Even then they constantly tended to slip back into pathetically simple repeated figures. On the other hand the individual etudes did have the virtue of being a little different from each other, unlike the earlier Five Metamorphoses which clung determinedly to one basic thought. If Glass were content to accept that he has talent for writing background music to accompany action, dance, movies, whatever, there would be no need to point out the obvious deficiencies in his craft. However, it seems success and the kind of adulation he received in the Opera House on Friday night have convinced him he is better than that. He isn't.