Title: unironic, inferior to original recording
Product review: Einstein on the Beach is one of the great works of music/theatre (as opposed to opera, or even traditional "musical theatre") of the 20th century, but the rerecording suffers from the bloated, cheap pretentiousness that characterizes almost all of Philip Glass's later work. Dilettantes criticize the original for the "artificial" timbre of the synthesizers, ignorant of the idea that the sound of the synthesizers are part of the piece as a historical text, or that the grating sound of the original recording actually emphasizes the formal qualities of Glass's minimalism. Utterly lacking in the irony and wit that made the first not only fascinating, but a pleasure to listen to, the rerecording is just dull.
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