No one could accuse the Wales Millennium Centre of being parochial as it celebrates its first anniversary. Rather, the programmers have opted for a global gesture by presenting Godfrey Reggio's cult trilogy - Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi - on successive nights, with Philip Glass and his ensemble playing his film score on stage. And they have stolen a march on San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall, who do the same in February.

Whether a screening plus concert performance can legitimately be called a new kind of event is questionable. Nevertheless, looking at what Reggio offers with new eyes is salutary. Many of Koyaanisqatsi's mages are startlingly potent 23 years on, as the world's strange beauties are juxtaposed with mankind's violation of his environment. Little has changed - certainly not the razed site of St Louis' Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks, whose demolition in the 1970s seemed to carry on exploding in the mind.

The parallel experience of image and music was fundamental to the Reggio/Glass concept. Hearing the score resonate live reinforced its immediacy, with Michael Riesman directing. Glass himself took the bass line, which, even more than the insistent rhythmic patterns, roots the sound with the visuals. If the artificiality of the electronics occasionally tipped the scales, the effect of the voices, seeming to intercede on behalf of the silent faces on screen, was altogether more haunting.

Koyaanisqatsi was already being filmed when the first world climate conference was held in Geneva in 1979. Perhaps the most sobering aspect of this evening was knowing that, as Montreal confers on the environment now, the pollution and desecration, sometimes masquerading as globalisation, to which Reggio was pointing has since become vastly more problematic.