Vanessa Wagner — Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes
About the event
On the final day of the festival, Romaeuropa anticipates the celebrations for Philip Glass’s 90th birthday, which will fall in January 2027, with Philip Glass Afternoon Sessions, an entire afternoon dedicated to one of the composers who most radically reshaped the sonic landscape of our time.
Within this horizon, the presence of Vanessa Wagner—one of the most original and authoritative pianists on the contemporary French scene—takes center stage in a complete performance of Philip Glass’s twenty Piano Études, unfolding over approximately three hours as an experience of listening, endurance, and immersion. Winner of a Victoire de la Musique and an interpreter equally at ease in the classical repertoire and contemporary music, Wagner approaches this monumental cycle not as a display of virtuosity, but as a constantly shifting soundscape, where repetition, variation, suspension, and drift construct a deeply hypnotic dramaturgy of time. Composed between the 1990s and early 2000s, the Études condense one of the most intimate yet architecturally rigorous forms of Glass’s writing, revealing his musical thought in its most stripped-down, exposed, and essential dimension. A river-like concert that is both tribute and reactivation: a way of returning to the beating heart of a work that continues to redefine the way we listen.
