Philip Glass and Robert Moran, The Juniper Tree (1985)

Here's a short opera by a famous composer and a significantly less famous composer. I'm intrigued by this, from the wikipedia entry:

Glass retained ownership of the opera, and did not allow for the "live" recording of the premiere...to be released until 2009. Until then, Moran encouraged his fans to distribute bootleg copies so that people could hear it.

"That jerk doesn't want you to hear our rad-as-hell opera! You should bootleg the hell out of it! That'll show him!" Glass' inflexibility is probably why the Met in HD recordings of Satyagraha and Akhnaten are not normally available--which sucks, as they're transcendent works of art. Come on, man!

Regardless, there's this Wolf Trap production we can all watch. It's a short, fairy-tale opera. The story is presented somewhat abstrusely, but it's not exactly a complicated story, when you get down to it: there's a woodcutter (or something--most of these dudes are woodcutters, right?). His wife dies, and his new one murders his son and serves him to his dad in a stew. Mm-mm good! The boy's sister buried his bones under the juniper tree, and his spirit takes the form of a bird and tells what happens and murders the hell out of his stepmother, then reincarnates. Apparently. And that's your lot.

The question you might be inclined to ask is: can I tell which parts are written by Glass and which by Moran? And the unsatisfying answer is: sort of, maybe, sometimes. There are definitely parts of this that sounds more and less the way I associate Glass sounding, but that's a pretty flimsy criterion to be using. Moran has his own operas, but none of them are available in any recorded form; it would be interesting to watch one and see if echoes of it are apparent here.

I will say, at any rate, that the two composers never clash: there's never a time when we get a jarring transition from one to the other. So the collaboration works in that sense. But I must say, on the whole, I didn't find it all that compelling. There were a few hypnotic, glassy elements, but overall--eh. The kabuki-ish production was effective, however, and it DOES make me want to see more Glass, which is a shame because I can't. Dang it.