Washington Classical Review

Jenny Lin performed music of Philip Glass Sunday afternoon at St Ann Catholic Church. Photo: C. Downey

The concert series at St. Ann Catholic Church in Northwest opened Sunday afternoon with a recital by Jenny Lin. The Taiwan-born pianist offered a program devoted entirely to the music of Philip Glass, who will celebrate his 90th birthday next January. 

The American composer, who was born in Baltimore, attended the Peabody Conservatory, as did Lin more recently. Lin, who has directed the concert series at the Phillips Collection since 2024, also maintains an active performing career. Surprisingly for a concert of minimalist music, the church was filled.

Lin has made a name as a Glass interpreter, and her comfort with the music shone through this performance. In “Opening,” the first movement from 1982’s Glassworks, she applied a flexible rubato, as well as carefully shaded phrasing through dynamics, belying the idea that the only way to play minimalist music is mechanically. A hidden melody of repeated pitches, resulting from Glass’s patterns, sprang back and forth in a sort of contrapuntal texture.

No applause intervened before Mad Rush, from 1979, which shared the same key center as the preceding piece, but shifted from minor to major. Lin played this complex work at a rather rapid pace, resulting in a seamless flurry of sextuplets. The slight metric shift that involves effectively adding a beat to the constantly oscillating meter came off so fluidly that it was almost undetectable.

Glass’s extensive career as a film composer was represented by three cues from his score for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, from 2002, arranged for piano by Michael Riesman and Nico Muhly. Lin kept the pacing of these pieces a little more metronomic, which helped reveal the cross-rhythms in “Morning Passages,” as well as dizzying scalar passages. Lin brought out the complicated layering of voicings in “Dead Things” and gave a romantic grandeur to “The Hours.”

Glass’s passacaglia Distant Figure, from 2017, formed a virtuosic arc with its earlier companion piece, Mad Rush. Lin allowed her tempo to fluctuate more in this piece, partly to accommodate some of the more demanding technical displays and partly to emphasize different parts of the texture. Even in this showpiece, the facets of the music sparkled in unexpected ways beyond the mere challenges of the score.

Lin released a complete recording of Glass’s Piano Etudes in 2017, to mark the composer’s 80th birthday. From the twenty pieces, composed over a period of nearly twenty years, Lin offered a selection of seven, spread across the two halves of the set. In Etude No. 1 and Etude No. 3, she emphasized speed. The approach worked in the former, but in the latter, the pacing was too frenetic to let the syncopated groove of the piece take hold.

Lin’s more moderate tempo gave Etude No. 2 a graceful swing across its subtle metric shifts, again revealing a melodic idea resulting from the rhythmic patterns. She was not shy here or in the other pieces about using the sustaining pedal to draw out the harmonic colors.

The subset of three later pieces opened with Etude No. 13, which has similar swinging qualities to Etude No. 3. Lin’s rapid-fire approach worked better in this case, making the major-minor clashes buzz with excitement without slowing them down. Lin played down the boogie-woogie sound of the descending chromatic bass line in Etude No. 14, and a gentle rubato gave the piece a sort of nostalgic sheen. Etude No. 16 could have provided a suitable end to the recital, with flourishes, kept in strict rhythm, growing into an orchestral scope in the louder middle section, with waves bouncing in every direction.

Lin’s idea instead was to close with Etude No. 6, which proved a suitable tour de force. Glass’s repeated-note theme in the right hand, especially at Lin’s breathless tempo, evoked Schubert’s song “Der Erlkönig” in some ways. Not least, the piece’s abrupt ending, like a reel-to-reel tape suddenly just running out, left the church’s sanctuary in stark silence.

For an encore, Lin brought the program full circle by playing “Closing,” the final piece of Glassworks. In the original version of the piece, “Closing” is an arrangement for chamber ensemble of “Opening.” Lin essentially played “Opening,” which was for solo piano, again. Like the Aria returning at the end of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the piece sounded rather different because of what had come before it.

The Mount Vernon Virtuosi and the Emmanuel Choir join forces for Mozart’s Missa Brevis in G and Requiem in D minor 3 p.m. September 27. stanndc.org