This record fills one of the most glaring gaps in the Philip Glass discography. Dance is an assemblage of five independent pieces created in collaboration with choreographer Lucinda Childs and artist Sol LeWitt, it straddles the period between Einstein on the beach of 1976 and Satyagraha of 1980. While the movements still aspire to the grand scale of Einstein (they range in duration from 19 to 24 minutes of unbroken, relentless music), there's a richness of polyphony and texture that points to an enlargement of Glass's musical vocabulary. While the basic ideas for each piece may be limited, the variety and internal complexities that result from their working-out barely deserve to be called 'minimal' either in method or effect.
A fine insert note by Richard Horn describes the unforgettable exuberance of this music, which ''somehow speaks all at once of joyful innocence, intense erotic desire, tenderness, regret and, finally, acceptance''. How true those words are in particular of Dances Nos. 1, 3 and 5, the three movements scored for Glass's typical ensemble of keyboards, woodwind and wordless soprano. Clean-textured, airy and brightly coloured, they fairly bubble with good spirits. For these pieces alone, the release demands a hearing. But even more alluring are the remaining two movements scored for keyboard solo. Dances Nos. 2 and 4 belong to another, unsuspected world quite unlike anything else Glass has written to date.
Dance No. 4, played by the composer himself on what sounds like a pipe organ of huge dimensions, is a monumental coruscating toccata, unstoppable in its allegro perpetual motion. Two principal ideas alternate: the first grows, modifies and corrupts on each reappearance; the second stubbornly remains the same. For 18 minutes that relationship remains stable. Then, without warning, the second idea suddenly blossoms into a stately sequence of chords, revolving around the circle of fifths with a magnificence that recalls Bach at his most monumental. If there is a slight sense of strain in the performance, this can be attributed to the exceptionally intricate layering of different rhythms and metres that have to be shared between hands and feet. That alone would daunt almost any other organist from taking on this work; but then, like virtually everything else Glass has written, the score is not published, and this recording stands as the sole testimony of its existence.
Dance No. 2 is quite unlike its noble partner. Indeed, it has all the obstinate frustration of a pinball or fruit machine that repeats its cycle of operations mindlessly and mechanically, always with the promise of outcome that is constantly denied. It is faultlessly played by Michael Riesman, appropriately on an organ registration that has all the tinny squalor of a cheap synthesizer. Like everything else in Dance this is beguiling music, and warmly recommended.'