“This disc takes its titles from the collection of piano etudes, Strange Energies, that I wrote between 2012 and 2019. Why are they strange and why energy? Everything is energy.” Thus begin the notes by pianist and composer Eleonor Sandresky for this new album Strange Energies of piano etudes by Sandresky and her friend Philip Glass.

Sandresky has worked intimately with Glass as a musician for over three decades and often performs with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Piano etudes are often designed to address a technical challenge in playing the piano. In the case of Glass’s etudes, many of the pieces were designed to address deficiencies in his own playing. Apart from technical challenges, Glass’s music clearly expresses a certain mood and tone in stark contrast to one another in the selected pieces on this new album. Inasmuch, Sandresky was an ideal candidate to bring to the fore her expertise as a pianist and interpreter of Glass’s music. However, in this case, that was not the tie that binds. Some of these same qualities of mood and technical challenge inhabit Sandresky’s etudes – yet Sandresky’s pursue a different more serious undertaking: Sandresky sought to capture in her music the unobtainable, the Strange Energies which surround and infiltrate our lives.

As Leonard Bernstein said, “Music can express the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.” Sandresky’s etudes connect themselves to everything from human emotions (Fear; Laughter) to events of the natural world (Flowing water; Thunder; Nor’easter), to meditations on what we might call scientific abstracts like Waves and Force. Through her own thrilling performance on the piano, Sandresky’s music and Glass’s music bring these Strange Energies directly to our hearts and souls.