By my count, Philip Glass has written 28 operas, the same number as Verdi. The count is iffy because Glass pushes the boundaries between what we tend to call opera and the fuzzier idea of music theater.
His first, *Einstein on the Beach* (1976), a collaboration between the composer and the late, innovative theater maker Robert Wilson, is a non-narrative effusion of imagery, movement, music, and text — each a brilliantly independent entity that somehow excites a hard-to-pin-down purpose. His latest (and probably his last, as Glass turns 90 this year) is *Circus Days and Nights*, a touching and thrilling opera for a circus, staged at a circus in Malmö, Sweden, in 2021. This caps a wondrous 45 years of operatic advancement.
You would have to go back to Handel’s 42 operas, Mozart’s 22, or Verdi’s oeuvre for operatic equivalence. Glass’ subject matter varies widely in epochs and ethoses, from ancient Egypt to Walt Disney’s Hollywood. Taken as a whole, these 28 operas reveal how we got to be who we are historically, artistically, spiritually, politically, and fancifully — often including more than one of those categories. A notable example is his third opera, *Akhnaten*, which Los Angeles Opera has recently remounted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
Glass’ instantly recognizable musical style has remained, over the years, consistently abstract and refreshing. It doesn’t tell you how to think, feel, or even understand. It simply grabs your attention; you do the interpreting.
Still, America knows little of Glass’ operatic enormity. The early “portrait” operas *Einstein on the Beach*, *Satyagraha* (about Gandhi), and *Akhnaten* (about the 14th-century BC Egyptian pharaoh) appear in repertory here and there — mostly in Europe — as do a trio of operas based on Jean Cocteau films. The rest remain little mounted, while several (but not all) have been recorded.
The Metropolitan Opera, for instance, commissioned *The Voyage* in 1992 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, but the epic opera is nowhere to be found in our semisesquicentennial year. It is sadly no longer even thinkable that *Appomattox*, Glass’ revelatory reminder of an America that once honored goodwill negotiation over political self-interest, will return to the Kennedy Center, where its final version premiered 11 years ago.
Los Angeles Opera has been better than most American companies in its attention to Glass. It has excellently presented the three portrait operas on its main stage, beginning with *Einstein* in the final and most brilliant revival of the original Wilson staging. The *Satyagraha* and *Akhnaten* revivals have been the designed-to-dazzle inventions of quirky director Phelim McDermott, a co-founder of Impossible, an eccentric British theater company.
When new in the last decade, these productions felt like the most arresting presentations of these operas since Achim Freyer’s in Stuttgart, Germany, in the early 1980s. Almost every performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion has sold out.
McDermott’s *Akhnaten* received the most attention thanks to breathtaking jugglers and lavish costumes, along with a touch of full-frontal novelty as Akhnaten dons his kitschy, glittery getup for his inauguration. Glass chose the pharaoh because he is thought to have been the first monotheistic ruler.
*Akhnaten* is revealed in episodes of his life, presented not as a fleshed-out narrative but as ritual, including a ravishing love duet with his wife, Nefertiti. The revolutionary pharaoh builds a great city and reduces spiritual chaos by focusing on a single-minded form of worship.
He appears androgynous in portraits, which led Glass to create the role for countertenor. The sung texts are in ancient languages, and there are no projected song titles. Instead, a narrator offers a somewhat loose notion of what’s happening in the audience’s language, notably during Akhnaten’s great aria — a hymn to Aten, god of the sun.
Ultimately, the pharaoh’s prescient spiritual optimism comes into conflict with the all-powerful establishment priests, who kill Akhnaten and Nefertiti. The opera ends with Akhnaten’s son, presumably Tutankhamun, restoring polytheism, and then, after a leap millennia into the future, the site is rediscovered by modern-day tourists.
The opera’s currency could not have been missed on Saturday, with the recent assassination of Shia cleric and Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his wife at the start of America’s and Israel’s conflict with Iran.
In the opera, the ghosts of Akhnaten, his wife, and mother have the last word in a glorious trio. When first performed at L.A. Opera a decade ago, the lavish production — co-produced with English National Opera — helped revive a neglected opera. Since then, *Akhnaten* has nearly gone mainstream.
The Metropolitan Opera also staged McDermott’s production, releasing it on CD and DVD, winning a Grammy for Best Opera Recording. Since then, choreographer Lucinda Childs, veteran of *Einstein on the Beach*, staged a stunningly chic *Akhnaten* in Nice, France, available on YouTube.
Last year, director Barrie Kosky caused a sensation with his staging at Komische Oper Berlin, starring American countertenor John Holiday. Holiday happens to be the Akhnaten in the L.A. Opera revival, and he is magnificent.
McDermott originally built his production around the gracefully emotive Anthony Roth Costanzo, slight and luminous in voice and build, and game for nudity. Costanzo’s disarming enthusiasm for the role was significant in mainstreaming *Akhnaten*. Holiday, by contrast, suggests a ruler of profound, unflappable dignity rather than vulnerability.
His hymn to Aten is an exercise in majesty — an ode not just to the sun but to the vast expanses of our solar system. In general, the singers elevate the production. Sun-Ly Pierce as Nefertiti and So Young Park as Queen Tye add allure. The large cast of smaller roles and chorus is excellent.
Zachary James returns as both Amenhotep III, Akhnaten’s father, and the engaging narrator, who occasionally threatens to get carried away. McDermott had perfectly employed James as the droll animatronic Disneyland Lincoln in his animation-friendly, slightly goofy production of *Perfect American* in Madrid, where that opera premiered.
Here, McDermott’s inspired staging demonstrated that Glass’ forgiving personal portrait of Walt Disney makes it the quintessential Hollywood opera — one that no one dares bring to squeamish Hollywood. Hollywood, however, is hardly squeamish when it comes to synchronized jugglers.
For McDermott, jugglers suggest somber ritual and were, in fact, known in Akhnaten’s Egypt. For the audience, they are a thrill a minute. For Glass, they may take on deeper meaning now that the circus is where he landed, 26 operas later.
As for Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska, making her L.A. Opera debut, she keenly keeps score and bounding balls together with cinematic flair. Glass removed violins from the orchestra to achieve a dark, primordial orchestral sound along with pounding percussion. Stasevska finds light, color, and action.
She conducts for the moment. Picturesque wind instruments suddenly burst forth as if a flock of birds were flying over the pyramids. Solo brass can sound momentous. The percussion pounds like nobody’s business, opening the score up to all the implied emotion and glitter on an over-stuffed stage.
Childs’ exalted use of dance and Kosky’s dazzling theatrical imagination may have moved us into a sleeker, more sophisticated, and paradisal Glassian realm, but the sheer passion McDermott and Stasevska bring continues its own attraction.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2026-03-05/philip-glass-akhnaten-is-back-at-la-opera-this-time-with-magnificent-john-holiday