Orange Mountain is proud to present the premiere recording of Philip Glass’s original score to the 2019 Broadway production of King Lear that starred Glenda Jackson as Lear and Ruth Wilson as Cordelia/The Fool.

For this new production, directed by Sam Gold and produced by Scott Rudin, Glass composed almost an hour of new music for string quartet. Gold and Glass decided not only would the music be featured prominently in the production, but that the musicians would be on stage for almost the entire duration of the play. Glass has been a self-described “theater composer” for most of his artistic life, dating back more than 50 years. Indeed, upon developing his own musical language in Paris in the mid-1960s, Glass’s first concert work in that language was his String Quartet no.1 from 1966.

Normally, the string quartet is the most intimidating medium for composers. However, Glass has found it to be an effective mode of communication. He has written eight numbered string quartets to date (his most recent being String Quartet no.8 from 2018) as well as scores for films ranging from Mishima (1985) to Bent (1997) to Dracula (1999). Glass’s new score features highlights such as the large central section, which constitutes eight tracks during the Storm, and a movement late in the play during a tender moment between Lear and Cordelia in Act 4, written for string trio (“How Does My Royal Lord”).

Complementing the quartet are three songs which Glass composed to the Shakespeare text including featuring Ruth Wilson singing “Fools Had Ne’er Less Grace in a Year”, “Winter’s Not Gone Yet”, and “It Raineth Every Day” as part of a role which earned Wilson a Tony nomination.

Glass’s quartet features violinists Natalie Cummins, Martin Agee, with Christopher Cardona on viola, and Stephanie Cummins on cello. Very unlike the field of concert music, before the score was recorded, the group was in the middle of a rigorous Broadway schedule consisting of eight performances a week. After over 100 performances in front of an audience, the music was so deeply internalized that by the time the quartet was brought into the studio, it was played with absolute mastery which would not be possible for a concert piece. The recording was produced by Glass’s long-time music director Michael Riesman.