Philip Glass has never been a man for vivid colours. While other post-minimalist composers have experimented with saturated hues and splashes of pigment, Glass makes the most of a thousand shades of grey. Which makes him a great collaborator. The Escher-like complexity of his scores complements the broader brush strokes of directors such as Robert Wilson or musical personalities such as Foday Musa Suso, whose supple kora playing against Glass's rolling triple figures is a central highlight of Orion.
Commissioned for the Cultural Olympiad 2001-04, and premiered in Athens on June 3, the ambitious and agreeably populist suite features a sequence of musicians from Australia, China, Canada, the Gambia (Suso), Brazil, India and Greece. All the soloists return for the finale, a traditional Greek tune sung by Eleftheria Arvanitaki.
The Philip Glass Ensemble - three woodwinds, three synthesisers, voice and two percussionists - provides a flexible, if slightly muddy orchestral backdrop. Australia features busy, cascading figures over the massive tones of Mark Atkins's didgeridoo: Atkins does everything with one note - Glass does one thing with a constellation of notes. Wu Man is fabulous on the pipa, which she plays with the virtuoso insouciance of a rock guitarist for the more chromatic China section. Nova Scotia fiddler Ashley MacIsaac strides on in a kilt for Canada - though this is where the composer is at his least individual. Brazilian trio Uakti are terrific on flutes, boobams and other tuned percussion instruments, with a hint of Glass's early systems music. Gaurav Mazumdar plays sitar for India, composed jointly by Glass and his mentor, Ravi Shankar.
The Ensemble is note-perfect, but the choice of keyboard sounds - or at least the way they are mixed - is perhaps a shade of grey too far, even within Glass's distinctive signature. In terms of timbre, some of Orion's best moments are the improvised exchanges between movements: a duet for didgeridoo and pipa; another for fiddle and nyanyer; and the strange and wonderful meeting of Mazumdar and Uakti, whose flautist, Artur Andres Ribeiro, whirls like a dervish.
