Opinion | Philip Glass’s ‘Symphony No. 13’ will be introduced to the world in Toronto

To Toronto falls the honour of introducing the world to Philip Glass’s “Symphony No. 13.”

And that is because Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra has chosen to give the music its world premiere March 30 at Roy Thomson Hall before taking it to New York’s Carnegie Hall and then to the National Arts Centre’s Southam Hall.

Glass premieres may not be the rarest occurrences in contemporary music. The New York-based notesmith numbers among the most prolific composers of his generation, with a long list of operas along with a large number of other works among his accomplishments.

Of course symphonies, ever since Haydn’s day, have represented a special challenge, especially in the wake of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” a game changer because of its enormous scope and power.

Not that every nation follows the Austro-Germanic tradition of exalting the symphony. Countries in the western tradition as musically important as France and Italy have given pride of prestige to operas. But in North America, the performing institution most often considered the centre of musical life in even small cities remains the symphony orchestra.

From a compositional point of view, 20th and 21st-century composers have certainly been less preoccupied with writing symphonies than their 18th and 19th-century predecessors.

Igor Stravinsky, often regarded as the musical titan of the past hundred years and more, wrote only one long and two short ones. Granted, his fellow Russian, Dmitri Shostakovich, wrote 15, but Glass’s 13 is an impressive number by modern standards.

Like most composers of recent vintage, Glass has not followed Gustav Mahler in expanding the symphony to enormous proportions. Indeed, some of his symphonies are as unlike typical symphonies as his operas are unlike typical operas. Only two of them — the third and fifth — rate a mention in his 2015 memoir “Words Without Music,” and none has entered the standard repertory.

There are those who would argue that his later music has increasingly departed from his classic minimalist style to sound less original and more mainstream, although the “Low Symphony” used three numbers from the David Bowie/Brian Eno album “Low” (1977) for thematic material, and Indian spiritual texts can be found in the “Symphony No. 5.”

So what can we expect from “Symphony No. 13”? As the saying goes, expect the unexpected.

What we certainly can expect is something strikingly different from the second symphonies of Schumann and Brahms featured on a recent National Arts Centre Orchestra two-CD album on the Analekta label. The album, titled “Lyrical Echoes,” is one of a series of four celebrating the remarkable association of Robert and Clara Schumann with the young Johannes Brahms.

Like other women of her time, Clara was not expected to pursue a professional career in composition — although she did become a major piano virtuoso — so her music understandably occupies a less than prominent place on these albums. That she was nonetheless a fine composer is demonstrated in 12 songs performed by the fine Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, accompanied by pianist Liz Upchurch.

The bulk of the new album is devoted to Schumann and Brahms, composers who followed in Beethoven’s footsteps, with Brahms so intimidated by their sound that he waited until middle age before publishing his first symphony.

Although many recommendable recordings of these symphonies already crowd the record catalogues — including, where Schumann is concerned, by the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s founding conductor, Mario Bernardi — Alexander Shelley, the orchestra’s current maestro, places the stamp of a fully engaged personality on the music.

We sometimes forget that orchestras in Schumann’s and Brahms’ day tended to be smaller than those today and the dimensions of the National Arts Centre Orchestra turn out to be just about right. There is no fat on these performances.

Moreover, the idea of linking all three composers provides, as Shelley points out in the notes, “an insightful narrative to the intertwined lives and works of these three Romantics.”

Although Philip Glass has also been called something of a Romantic, the description seems far better suited to the composer of another piece on the orchestra’s Toronto program, Erich Korngold’s “Violin Concerto” (to be played by Blake Pouliot). Glass would surely be quick to point out that labels are acts of oversimplification and the label most often applied to him — minimalist — tells only part of the story.