String Quartet No. 5

For anyone who thinks they know what to expect with Glass, the opening of this quartet is a surprise because it sounds like late Romanticism: sweeping, pensive, elegiac. And although the later movements return to more familiar ground for the composer, with his trademark chugging repetitions and arpeggios, the Fifth Quartet is in many ways the closest he comes to the time-honored Western tradition of writing for four string instruments, passing through a wider range of colors, textures, and styles than is usual in his work. Written in 1991, when Glass was in his early 50s, it contrasts ecstatic outpourings with moments of affecting tenderness, and lives up to the composer’s own description as a "quartet about musicality." There are five movements, of which the elegiac first is effectively a short prelude to the second, where the insistent pulse and repeating figures kick in and continue through movements three and four. The finale has a teeming busyness with a fiercely energetic rise and fall of unison scales before subsiding into a reminiscence of the quartet’s opening mood.