THE PHILIP GLASS ENSEMBLE

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. In the early 1960s, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and, while there, earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. By 1974, Glass had a number of innovative projects creating a large collection of new music for The Philip Glass Ensemble and for the Mabou Mines Theater Company. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts and the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, for which he collaborated with Robert Wilson. Since Einstein, Glass has expanded his repertoire to include music for opera, dance, theater, chamber ensemble, orchestra and film. His scores have received Academy Award nominations (Kundun, The Hours, Notes on a Scandal) and a Golden Globe (The Truman Show). In the past few years several new works were unveiled including an opera on the death of Walt Disney, The Perfect American (co-commissioned by Teatro Real, Madrid and the English National Opera), a new touring production of Einstein, the publication of Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music, by Liveright Books, and the premiere of the revised version of Glass’ opera Appomattox, in collaboration with librettist Christopher Hampton, by the Washington National Opera in November 2015. 

Glass celebrated his 80th birthday on January 31, 2017 with the world premiere of Symphony No. 11 at Carnegie Hall. His 80th birthday season featured programming around the globe, including the U.S. premieres of operas The Trial and The Perfect American, and world premieres of several new works, including Piano Concerto No. 3 and String Quartet No. 8. 

In 2015, Glass received the U.S. National Medal of Arts and the 11th Glenn Gould Prize. He was honored with the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair from Carnegie Hall for the 2017-2018 season. Glass received the 41st Kennedy Center Honors in December 2018. In January 2019 the Los Angeles Philharmonic presented the world premiere of Glass’ Symphony No. 12, based on David Bowie’s album Lodger and a completion of three symphonies based on Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy.  

Glass continues to perform solo piano and chamber music evenings with world renowned musicians. 

The Philip Glass Ensemble (PGE) comprises the principal performers of the music of Philip Glass. In 1968, Glass founded the PGE in New York City as a laboratory for his music. Its purpose was to develop a performance practice to meet the unprecedented technical and artistic demands of his compositions. In pioneering this approach, the PGE became a creative wellspring for Glass, and its members remain inimitable interpreters of his work.

The artists of the PGE recognize their unique position in the history of music of the past half-century, and passing on that legacy is part of their practice. A deep dedication to educating the next generation of musicians is integral to the PGE’s work, both on tour and as the Ensemble-in-Residence at The Philip Glass Institute at The New School.

The PGE debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, and in its early years performed primarily in the galleries, artist lofts, and museums of SoHo’s then-thriving artistic community. In the five decades since, the PGE has performed in world-renowned music festivals and concert halls across five continents, and has made records with Sony, Nonesuch, and Orange Mountain Music.

Many of Philip Glass’s most celebrated works were expressly composed for the PGE: its core concert pieces Music in Twelve Parts, Music in Similar Motion, and Music with Changing Parts; the opera and musical theater projects Einstein on the Beach, Hydrogen Jukebox, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, Monsters of Grace; and the full-length dance works Dance (Lucinda Childs) and A Descent Into the Maelström (Australian Dance Theater). The PGE is most widely acclaimed for its soundtracks to Godfrey Reggio’s trilogy of wordless films: Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. It is also featured in Glass’s operas La Belle et la Bête and The Photographer.

The Philip Glass Ensemble is the exclusive performer of its repertoire and is dedicated to bringing it to audiences worldwide.

By special arrangement with Philip Glass and Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc.

The Philip Glass Ensemble is booked by Park Avenue Artists.

Michael Riesman is a composer, conductor, keyboardist, record producer, and is the Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, which he joined in 1974. He has conducted and performed on many recordings of works by Glass, including most of his film soundtracks. He has recorded five albums of piano arrangements of Glass film music: The Hours, Dracula, Philip Glass Soundtracks, Beauty and the Beast, and Philip Glass Soundtracks Vol. 2. He has conducted major ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Toronto, Sydney, and BBC Symphony Orchestras, and has appeared as a piano soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Milwaukee Symphony. He has conducted and performed on albums by Paul Simon (Hearts and Bones) and David Bowie (BlackTie/White Noise). Riesman's work Formal Abandon, a commission by choreographer Lucinda Childs, is available on iTunes.  

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize winner who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She has received awards and fellowships from the Koussevitzky Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Letters, OPERA America, and American Antiquarian Society, Loghaven Artist Residency, and was part of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps. She received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser. Her music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO, Louisville Orchestra, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. Bielawa consistently incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the pandemic, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her work Broadcast from Home, now archived by the Library of Congress. Bielawa has been the vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.

Dan Bora is a producer, engineer, and sound designer of albums, film scores, and live sound. Bora has worked with Marina Abramovic, Laurie Anderson, Anohni, Howard Shore, The Magnetic Fields, Nico Muhly, Michael Nyman, Sufjan Stevens and many others. His credits include Academy Award-winning Fog of War, the Academy Award-nominated The Illusionist, as well as the revival of Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, and the Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. Dan Bora’s live work has been praised as “deft,” “provocative and even poignant” (The New York Times). 

Peter Hess is, in addition to the PGE, a member of Slavic Soul Party, Bang on a Can’s Asphalt Orchestra, and Barbez, and was a part of Balkan Beat Box for a decade. He appears on over 100 recordings and can often be heard coming out of your television. He performs all over the world, in concert halls, festivals, prisons, and dives. He’s appeared and/or recorded with David Sanborn, Alarm Will Sound, David Byrne, Big Lazy, Guignol, Tony Visconti, Songs:Ohia, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Tim Berne, Jabbo Ware, Jack McDuff, Dirty Projectors, Darcy Argue’s Secret Society, Devotchka, TV on the Radio, Spiritualized, Wu Tang Clan, ICE, the Hold Steady, Son Volt, AntiSocial Music, and dozens more. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and his work composing and arranging for winds and strings can be heard on many records, as well as HBO's Bored to Death, PBS’s Make 'em Laugh, the feature documentaries Art and Craft and Maineland: much of that arranging and studio work goes on in his own little studio Fort Saint Marks. He holds a deep love of the music of the Balkans, which he has researched and studied in Roma villages in southern Serbia. His own records can be found at diskonife.com, the imprint he co-runs. 

After graduating from Full Sail University, Ryan Kelly began his career at the renowned Legacy Recording Studios in New York City. Since then he has worked on live performances across five continents alongside artists including Paul Simon, Philip Glass Ensemble, Solange, Eighth Blackbird, Nico Muhly, yMusic and Son Lux. He began working with the Philip Glass Ensemble for the revival of Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach and joined the Ensemble in 2014. Recent studio work has seen him has producing film scores and recording albums with Beyoncé, Roomful of Teeth, Marc Ribot, and Booker T Jones ft. The Roots. His sound design credits include multiple shows with the Steven Petronio Company, Dream’d in a Dream with the Sean Curran Company, and The Dorothy K with Saint Genet ft Zac Pennington & Brian Lawlor. 

Since moving to New York in 2002, Sam Sadigursky continues to make a mark as both a leader and sideman across a broad spectrum of musical landscapes. His series of four albums of original music based on poetry and text for New Amsterdam Records, entitled The Words Project, have been acclaimed internationally. Sadigursky has toured and recorded as a saxophonist and clarinetist with artists as diverse as Brad Mehldau, Fred Hersch, Lucia Pulido, Gabriel Kahane, Tom Jones, Edmar Castaneda, Linda Oh, The Mingus Orchestra, Rufus Reid, Jamie Baum Septet+, David Yazbek, Ljova, Pablo Mayor’s Folklore Urbano, and La Cumbiamba eNeYe, and has been nominated for three Grammy awards for his work with Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. As a leader, he is currently performing with his group The Solomon Diaries. As a composer, he has written for film and modern dance and has also published four books of original etudes for clarinet and saxophone. He is the recipient of numerous grants from organizations such as Chamber Music America, ASCAP, Jerome Foundation, and the New York Mills Cultural Center. 

Andrew Sterman has been a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992, and has a highly personal presence in the music community (The New York Times: "beautiful, sensitive, and high-energy playing,” Wall Street Journal: “Powerful, standout moment”, National Post Canada  “Searing”, London Observer: “Virtuosic”). His album The Path To Peace was called, “A major conceptual work, whose exquisite ebb and flow merits listening by a worldwide audience” (All About Jazz: New York), and “A wonderful and inspiring album” (Philip Glass). Of his Wet Paint album: “Questing, devoid of self-indulgence, emotionally flexible” (Jazz Times), “emotive lyricism, inventively architected, superb compositional pen” (Jazz Review). Sterman is a practitioner/teacher of qigong and Chinese medicinal arts, especially the use of food as medicine. He is author of the two-volume book, Welcoming Food: Diet as Medicine for the Home Cook and Other Healers (2020, Classical Wellness Press, NYC) and teaches both music and food practice internationally as well as in New York City.     

Born in New York City, Michael Amacio, tour/production manager, is known as a composer, live audio engineer and event producer. Mentored by keyboardist Jimmy Destri, a founding member of the band Blondie, Amacio was introduced to the audio engineering world working as Destri’s assistant. This unique experience became an indispensable part of his growing career as he went on to receive his Bachelor's Degree in Audio Production at the State University of New York, Purchase College. Since then he has worked for some of the world’s most important art institutions such MoMA PS1, MoMA (Museum of Modern Art- NYC), renown dance music club Output, along with serving as Production Manager for the NYC event space Knockdown Center, and as a touring live sound engineer for The Magnetic Fields & Sevdaliza. As Production Manager for Quo Vadis, a production company dedicated to exposing experimental music with domestic and international artists, his role varies with his main responsibility focusing on ensuring the highest quality of events in New York City.