by Rich Elias, Feb 11, 1999

Composer Phillip Glass brought his ensemble to the Wexner Center in Columbus last night to perform "Monsters of Grace," described as a "digital opera in 3 dimensions."

An ambitious and frequently brilliant work, "Monsters" combines Glass' music with 3-D video sequences projected above the ensemble on a large screen. Four vocalists with the ensemble sang a libretto of poetic excerpts from Rumi, a 13th century Persian mystic.

This exotic combination engaged the eyes, ears, and minds of the audience, may of whom were familiar with Glass' signature style: rudimentary melodies repeated without variation, synthesizer-generated arpeggios, a fusion of influences from non-western music. In "Monsters of Grace," Glass melds Indian raga into his music, returning to one of the earliest influences on his work.

"Monsters" inverts two conventions of music performance that have dominated classical music since the 19th century. The concert hall insists that we "watch" music being "performed." We have to sit and pay attention to players playing. Only a handful of soloists or exuberant conductors know how to make this aspect of concert going interesting. Also, our expectation is that musicians produce the music we hear while we sit there. Not so in "Monsters of Grace." Glass merges live music with canned pieces "played," if you can call it that, by a programmed synthesizer. He thus creates music no live musicians could present on stage. Technology is central to his creation. The 3-D videos, conceived by Robert Wilson (Glass' collaborator in "Einstein on the Beach," 1976), provide a visual analogue to the composer's exploration of new music technologies. The audience watched as a giant hand curled its fingers out toward the audience or followed a house floating down a river into the ocean. The 3-D effect was often stunning, but several video sequences were unsuccessful. The floating house looked too much like a Monty Python cartoon. Some were dark and looked darker when observed through polarized 3-D glasses provided to each spectator.

Glass and Wilson intended the music and video to put the audience into a mental zone in which it could feel and understand Rumi's meditative lyrics. The most effective sequences achieved this through visuals which showed objects moving forward from a vanishing point in the distant background. The 3-D image thus created a sense of the infinite which amplified Rumi's poetry yet reinforced the sense that Glass and Wilson saw the fusion of art and technology as the means to this end.

The finest sequences balanced contemplation and surprise, with the visuals and music working together, forcing the audience to pay attention in new ways. However, Wilson's video concepts more often seemed unconnected to Rumi's lyrics and not completely integrated with Glass's score.

It struck me as I watched "Monsters of Grace" that Phillip Glass is trying to move some of the givens of modern rock performance into the concert hall. We expect big-stadium rock events to showcase "hot" visuals, larger than life, to stir up the audience while a Mick Jagger or Mick Fleetwood capers below. We also understand, in a rock concert, that some of the music comes out of a can. "Monsters of Grace" combines the visuals and canned music, but for an effect totally different from a rock concert. It puts us into an alpha state, not into a Dionysian frenzy. No mosh pit for Phillip Glass, in other words. But he's learned a few lessons from the music others in his generation added to our cultural mix.