GREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET: "AKHNATEN"
PBS, 12:00 p.m. ET
Back in the mid-1970s, I was introduced to Philip Glass – not the composer, but his music – by my very good friend Mark Clark, who used to run the classical music section at the local Peaches record store in Fort Lauderdale. He was helping me move from one Gainesville college location to another, and we had rented a cheap moving truck with no radio. So we set up two portable radios, one at my old place, one at the new one, and tuned them to the same radio station, so we could listen to music as we lugged furniture and boxes in and out. Because Mark was not only tuned, but attuned, to the local public radio station, he knew it was broadcasting the just-released recording of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach – a lengthy modern opera that, then and now, remains one of the most enchantingly weird things I’ve ever heard. The joke was, Glass’ minimalistic music changed by such tiny and slow increments that it felt like, despite the 15 minutes of blackout radio silence between the two locations, we always seemed to enter one home with the exact same music playing we had last heard when leaving the other. I’ve been fascinated by Philip Glass ever since. And this opera, Akhnaten, is the 1983 part of Glass’ trilogy about famous thinkers, and is about the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, aka Amenhotep IV – and parts of it are sung, I’m pretty sure, in Sanskrit. I saw a revival of this recent production of Akhnaten at the Met last November, and also saw it, later the same week, simulcast to movie theaters, in the presentation offered today, on tape, by Great Performances at the Met. Other than the absence of male frontal nudity, it’s the same four-and-a-half-hour opera you’d have seen live – and some of the stage effects are as singularly odd and mesmerizing as the music. Come for the jugglers; stay for the song salutes to monotheism. Anthony Roth Costanzo stars in the title role, with J’Nail Bridges as Nefertiti. Check local listings.