Máire Carroll’s new double album Philip Glass: Complete Piano Etudes is the culmination of a mountain of work. Released during the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August, it is also part of a 2023 RIAM doctoral dissertation and, on 27 September in the National Concert Hall’s Kevin Barry Room, was given a complementary concert in which Carroll contextualised Glass’ works in a thoughtful programme of études that ranged from the early Romantic composer Hélène de Montgeroult to the contemporary composer Unsuk Chin. (Carroll’s dissertation also situates Glass’ études in this long tradition.)

Glass has written twenty études in two books: the first set of ten was mostly written between 1991 and 1996, and the second set was completed in 2012. As Carroll notes, they thus stretch across more than twenty years of Glass’ career, from the restrained minimalism of Solo Piano (1989) to a more varied and inclusive approach. Since Maki Namekawa’s debut recording of the two books in 2014, they have been recorded perhaps two dozen times, and have come to be regarded as an important entry in the history of the étude. They are hardly typical études, though: they are set apart by the grandness of their scope, with many of Glass’ études lasting more than seven minutes when others’ études often do not last even two minutes; on the other hand, they do not present the challenge associated with concert études. But études they are: indeed, Glass wrote the first book specifically to overcome his own technical indifference at the keyboard and to give himself material for solo concerts, and the surface-level repetitiveness for which he is so well known belies constant, and tricky, shifts.

For me, Glass’ études are at their strongest as a radical break from the pianistic tradition. His piano is not a hand-crafted wooden instrument, but an industrial machine of engineered steel and pig iron. It is singular in its ability to create enormous waves of sound. With Vicky Chow (her 2022 recording of the cycle), I hear Etude 2 as having an electricity substation in its background: the right hand creating a stable hum, and the left hand presenting industrial clunks that are more than human in their volume and register. With Jacopo Salvatori (2018), Etude 1 sounds to me like a factory conveyer belt. Etude 6 has the inhuman suddenness of a machine (listen to Yuja Wang’s subito fortes in The Vienna Recital, 2024).

Carroll, by contrast, in keeping with her academic perspective, sees Glass’ études as continuous with the European pianistic tradition. She plays the opening notes of Etude 2 as a melody (an interpretation that was even more pronounced in the Kevin Barry Room) and the bass notes as a support. She is comfortable with graceful rallentirs at the end of pieces and with expressive swells, and (to my ears) draws out the influence of Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary’ étude in Etude 4. I don’t think inviting comparison with these composers does Glass any favours, but then he invites this approach by giving these works the half-French name ‘etudes’ (without the accent): he could have called them ‘studies’ if he didn’t see himself as standing in that tradition. So I am grateful to Carroll for her Romantic perspective.

In the second book, Carroll’s approach is an easier fit. Whereas the first book was written when Glass’ style was more strictly minimalist, the second book is more varied and humane, quietly incorporating idioms from the piano tradition such as the descending bass motif of Etude 14 or the ‘cadenza’ in the middle of Etude 15.

Some of Carroll’s initially strange choices make sense in light of her dissertation: she is explicit there about her keenness to hew close to the score rather than treat it as a showcase for virtuosity (her tempi, for example, are closer to the ones indicated in the scores than many other pianists’). I wonder whether some of the choices are overly literal; I wonder, for example, whether her obedience to phrasing marks gives structural clarity at the cost of fluidity. But Carroll knows exactly what she is doing, and her approach gives me continued food for thought. Perhaps ironically for a CD of études, there is an egolessness about this recording that makes it perhaps the most accurate picture on record of what exactly Glass wrote. 

Máire Carroll (Photo: Mark Taylor)

Glass in context at the NCH
The Kevin Barry Room recital took us right to the start of the piano étude. The composer given the most time (apart from Glass himself) was Hélène de Montgeroult, who was arguably the first composer to write concert études. She was also the first composer to spend an inordinately long time at them: her 114-étude cycle took her from 1788 to 1812 to complete (though many of them, especially the earlier ones, are not performance pieces). De Montgeroult’s études prefigured Chopin’s, as Carroll persuasively argued through the pairing of de Montgeroult’s ‘Harp’ étude (No. 41) with Chopin’s ‘Harp’ étude (Op. 25/1). De Montgeroult is a new name to me – perhaps unsurprisingly, as Carroll was giving her her first Irish outing – but I was pleasantly surprised by these well-crafted and melodious miniatures.

After the interval, we moved to the modern piano étude with György Ligeti’s fearsome ‘L’escalier du diable’ (No. 13). Carroll took this at a slower pace than I am used to, but in doing so she brought out musical devices and structural sense that are normally lost in the furious polymetric onslaught. This unforgiving toccata was followed by another, Unsuk Chin’s ‘Toccata’ étude (No. 5), and then by the sixth of Nikolai Kapustin’s Eight Concert Études, the ‘pastoral.’ Possibly Carroll should have taken a moment longer to breathe after the two toccatas, because she was not always entirely in control of the Kapustin. This was a shame, because when she was in control, she played with a lovely naturalness, shifting organically between leggiero and pedal, and the piece had more life in her hands than in any other performance I know, including Kapustin’s own.

The programming of the concert perhaps reflects Glass’ position in the history of the étude more generally. Whereas most of the pieces had obvious continuity with each other – Chin was Ligeti’s pupil, both de Montgeroult and Chopin wrote ‘harp’ études, etc. – Glass’ works stand apart: still, expansive, timeless; they served almost as a frame in Carroll’s recital. It took me a long time to even see how they could stand in the tradition of études. And in a way they do stand on the edge of that tradition, both less and more than études: their repetitiveness draws them closer to exercises such as Hanon’s Virtuoso Pianist, and their scale draws them beyond the étude form – No. 20 could be a nocturne. It is to Carroll’s credit that I’ve come around to thinking that this is an interesting place to stand.

Philip Glass: Complete Piano Etudes by Máire Carroll is released on Delphian Records. Visit www.delphianrecords.com.

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