20-05-2025
Apartment House review — I felt trapped in this baffling concert
Sitting in the 18th-century Octagon Chapel in Norwich you do feel trapped inside a mathematical obsession, with everything from the building's shape to the panes in each window being a multiple of eight. Where better, though, to hear Philip Glass's Music in Eight Parts? There you also feel trapped — inside the laborious working-out of an equally mathematical process: the use of additive rhythms to lengthen, quaver by quaver, a single phrase and gradually enriched cadence that's repeated hundreds of times.
But did it have to be so laborious as it sounded in this Norfolk and Norwich Festival concert by the ensemble Apartment House? When the piece was reconstructed five years ago, having been mislaid since 1970 when Glass wrote it, it was recorded
