Listeners expecting a glittering evening at the piano with the composer will be disappointed by this record. No album of sparser music by Philip Glass exists. Just as the cover photograph is sombre and introspective, so the music restricts itself to darker shades, largely shunning those cascades and coruscating figurations so characteristic of Glass's operas and ensemble works.
In Metamorphosis, more than in any other of his works, Glass draws close in spirit to that pioneer of the minimalist aesthetic, Satie; not Satie the buffoon, but rather the soulful, archaizing author of the Gymnopedies Gnossiennes and Nocturnes. Glass borrows Satie s way of using the same mould to shape each of the five pieces in his set, so that they appear as variations or reworkings of one another: they share the same minor mode, the same tempo, the same oscillating patterning, above all the same melancholy privacy, so rarely glimpsed in the music of this conspicuously high-spirited composer. Surprisingly, four of the movements began life as incidental music, two of them coming from the soundtrack for Errol Morris's The thin blue line. Certainly the coherence of the set as it now stands shows no sign of those disparate origins, and by recapitulating the music of Metamorphosis one in the fifth piece—which belongs exclusively to the piano work—Glass effectively draws the cycle yet further in upon itself.
Mad rush, written in 1981, has had a varied career. Premiered on a cathedral-size organ on the occasion of the Dalai Lama's first public address in New York City, it subsequently served as a dance score before making its final (or rather, its latest) metamorphosis into a concert work for piano. It remains a stark, ceremonial piece. Only in the final work on the album, Wichita vortex sutra, does the mood become cheerier: major thirds actually outnumber minor, and even a tune almost manages to break out of the faintly glitzy harmonies and rhythms, with their distant echoes of Scott Joplin. But at a mere six minutes, the proportion of sunshine to cloud on this record is very low indeed.'