From the Philip Glass Recording Archive, Vol 1: Theater Music is the first release of a new series of discs on Orange Mountain Music taken from the vast archive of recordings made in the last 40 years of Glass’s career. They span the entire range of his compositional activities: music for film, theatre, dance and concert hall in a wide variety of scores including chamber music, solo instruments and orchestral works. Many will be heard on CD for the first time in OMM’s continuing effort to expand and document the Philip Glass recording legacy.

Theater Music Volume 1 features two ravishingly beautiful works from the theatre. The instrumental suite drawn from the 2003 chamber opera The Sound of a Voice features Asian and Western instruments in one of Glass’s most creative scores. In effect a diptych of chamber operas, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, they explore how intimacy is achieved between people who have lived in seclusion: the dreams and fantasies of a Japanese writer and an aging warrior are laid bare.

In the Summer House is the original music Glass composed for a major revival - at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater in 1993 - of Jane Bowles’ play some 40 years after its Broadway premiere. It’s an ambiguous drama focusing on two mothers, one selfish and ruthless who despises her dreamy daughter, and the other who is gentle but dominated by her strong-minded offspring. Glass’s haunting, lyrical music is scored for violin and cello.