Third Coast Percussion — Philip Glass: Aguas da Amazonia
About the event
On the final day of the festival, Romaeuropa anticipates the celebrations for Philip Glass’s 90th birthday, which will take place in January 2027, with Philip Glass Afternoon Sessions, an entire afternoon dedicated to one of the composers who has most radically reshaped the sonic landscape of our time.
At the center of this tribute, Third Coast Percussion (a Chicago-based quartet and Grammy Award-winning ensemble, the first percussion group in history to receive the award in the classical category) presents Aguas da Amazonia, one of Glass’s most hypnotic and visionary scores, reinterpreted through an expanded, fluid, and immersive timbral universe.
Born from the long artistic dialogue between the American composer and the ensemble, and newly reactivated in a 2025 version created for Twyla Tharp Dance, the work moves through Glass’s writing like a liquid geography of pulses, reverberations, and layers, where minimalism becomes living, organic, almost ritual matter.
After celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025, Third Coast Percussion continues to establish itself as one of the most inventive ensembles on the international scene, pushing percussion beyond its traditional boundaries and transforming each concert into a physically engaging, surprising, and radically contemporary listening experience. An immersion into Glass’s universe that is at once tribute, reactivation, and promise.
