Concert notes. (Music).

Galileo Galilei, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

Philip Glass is unsure of how many operas he has written, though it is upwards of eighteen. This doesn't quite put him into the Donizetti sphere, but it does distinguish him among twentieth-century composers. Einstein on the Beach, a collaboration with Robert Wilson, is his most famous work, and the "history" operas on Gandhi and Akhnaten have been revived. His penchant for examining historical figures continues with The White Raven, on the career of Vasco da Gama, and with the current Galileo Galilei. Galileo premiered last spring at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and was brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House as its opening for the 2002 Next Wave Festival.

This ninety-minute "opera," which is more oratorio/pageant than dramatic work, was written by Mary Zimmerman with Glass and Arnold Weinstein and was directed by Zimmerman. It tells Galileo's story backwards in nine scenes, from his blind old age, reminiscing on the past. The opera moves in a retrograde motion from his recantation, inquisition, promulgation of his earth/sun thesis, to when he invented the telescope. Much of the text is derived from original sources.

The epilogue is a Zimmerman conceit: a performance of an early opera (by Galileo's father). This serves as a metaphor for Galileo's life, at the end of which he is summoned to Heaven by his beloved dead daughter Marie Celeste.

In fact this ending (which is similar, as I recall it, to the ending of The White Raven) allows the work to finish positively rather than on the poignancy of an old man muttering "Eppur si muove," in the opening monologue. What we have is a circus finale--everyone onstage parading and rejoicing at the sanctification of a great name. Not incidentally, audiences find the circus atmosphere infectious.

Glass's music is, of course, instantly recognizable, although the ...