Philip Glass is the most articulate and prolific of artists, with a vocation for radical but accessible new music, and an overlapping career in film soundtracks. Though his recent opera Galileo Galilei was roundly slated, his work for independent and commercial cinema has always found friends, and his score for Stephen Daldry's forthcoming movie The Hours has been nominated for a Golden Globe award.
The first concert in this five-day festival of the composer's film music comprised four shorts commissioned by Glass himself, plus two collaborations with Godfrey Reggio, who made the groundbreaking, hugely influential Koyaanisqatsi with Glass in 1983. Peter Greenaway's The Man in the Bath was (calli)graphic and static, like an animated Hockney photo-collage. Shirin Neshat's Passage was epic and eerie, with clever use of sampled voices, while Atom Egoyan's Diaspora was ugly and angry. The most innovative short was Michal Rovner's mysterious Notes, assembled from footage of figures in a snowy landscape.
All the music was performed by an augmented version of the composer's ensemble, with many musicians who have played with Glass since the early 1970s. The instrumental line-up is not hugely different from Glass's first band, though the Farfisa organs have been replaced by sampling keyboards and there are now two percussionists. They performed live to the screen and were conducted from a keyboard by Michael Riesman.
Glass invites his listeners to join him in a parallel universe all his own - it is as if half the history of music never happened. But even within this universe, the work is maddeningly varied: at some moments a glorious, otherworldly marriage of sound and image, at others a functional but cloth-eared jumble. And when Glass writes for percussion, it often lacks "feel".
The most affecting short was Reggio's Evidence, a stunning sequence of young children's faces, filmed while they were absorbed in an unnamed TV programme. The underscore was a percussion-free piece from the 1980s called Facades. Led by saxophonist Jon Gibson, the ensemble performed with heartening attention to detail and timbre.
· Season continues until January 11. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
