History

 

The GlassWorlds project started years ago, when I was contacted Daniel Boéri who wanted to create in Monaco an "off-season" important cultural event to attract new audience and tourists as well. I had the idea to bring a very successful concept, a 3 full days weekend of concerts around a very well known figure, in the very same way as the great “Folle Journée de Nantes” festival.

 

As an active promoter of nowadays music I also wanted to do it for a composer that was as popular from both the classical/contemporary and the pop. audience. Of course I choose Philip GLASS. Unfortunately, when the project was almost complete, Monaco was strongly hit by the world economic crisis, and many national major projects were canceled or postponed, so was my festival-like. But I did not want to waste so many months spent on this project.

Luckily some parts of it got attentions:

The Alterminimalism Festival in Paris invited me to realize the world premiere of the Night of Glass -the complete piano music in a

non-stop recital- with huge success (+2000ppl).

In Monaco the Entrepôt Galery invited me for their 3rd Anniversary to do the world premiere of the complete Philip Glass piano concertos, again successfully as the concert was sold out.

Also in this Monaco Festival-like project, one part was very interesting : many composers would had to do a new piece as an Homage to Philip GLASS. Unfortunately it could not happen. I still remember the ones who were really wonderful and composed homages when the festival was still under negotiation. Of course, I created all their pieces in forthcoming concerts. I will not put details of the concerts as it will be a useless list, but on the other hand, I would really like to thank them.

Those composers were : Régis Campo, Denis Levaillant, Arnaud Desvignes, Gaylor Morestin, Fulvio Caldini, Jeroen van Veen, Tomasz Kamieniak, Carson P. Cooman & Kyle Gann.

 

Last year, after my successful 35 hours non-stop version of Erik Satie 's Vexations in Palais de Tokyo, we started to talk about re-doing the Glass Marathon. One major issue for me, was the fact that only 2 years separated Palais de Tokyo 's Glass Marathon, with the one I did for the Alterminimalism Festival. So, as the Palais de Tokyo offered me a carte blanche, I had the crazy idea to add to the Glass Marathon, the old project of the Glass Homages, into a newer project that I named Palais de Glass.

I already had 9 compositions and knew that some other composers were interested. I also asked new composers that I met and premiered their work. At this very time I was dreaming to have maximum 30 homages, but… it was without the rapidly growing enthusiasm from all those composers that shared the project with their own friends who contacted me to take part in the project.

 

A very important point for me was to let the composers completely free. I did not want to have dozen of Philip Glass copies (as a copy is never as good as the original), but on the other hand, I asked them to make the homage as if I was looking at Philip Glass music though their own language and musical world, exactly as you would look at an object though a kaleidoscope. I am extremely proud to have received homage that are very different one from another, from free atonalism, to minimalist, postminimalism to serialism, neo romanticism, graphic notation, ebow, movement on the piano, electroacoustic mixed, to haitian carnaval, virtuoso tango or asian inspiration...

 

Now the Homage part is as important as the Philip Glass solo pieces and I renamed the whole new program : GlassWorlds as a clin d'oeil to the very famous Philip Glass piece GlassWorks.

 

The concert is made to be, as usual with some of my programs, a solo non-stop concert, but time to time I will have the pleasure to share the platform with some musical friends such as Megumi Shibata, Branka Parlic or Antonio Correa.