Philip Glass: Akhnaten

Philip Glass’s Akhnaten is the third and final part of an informal trilogy of “portrait” operas, following Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Satyagraha (1980), each built around a historical figure whose ideas reshaped how people saw the world. Where those two operas took Einstein and Gandhi as their subjects, Akhnaten turns to the Egyptian pharaoh who, in the 14th century BC, briefly abolished the traditional pantheon in favour of monotheistic worship of the sun disc Aten, reforms that were undone almost immediately after his death, his monuments defaced and his name struck from later king lists. This 2019 Metropolitan Opera recording, made under conductor Karen Kamensek with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role, went on to win the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording.

About the production

The staging recorded here is director Phelim McDermott’s production, first mounted by English National Opera in 2016 before transferring to the Met. Its most widely discussed feature is the use of live jugglers, choreographed by Sean Gandini, as a recurring visual presence throughout, a non-literal, ritualistic counterpart to Glass’s famously repetitive, slowly evolving orchestral writing, rather than a way of illustrating plot events on stage. That visual dimension obviously doesn’t carry over to an audio-only CD release, but it’s worth knowing about as a defining feature of this specific production, distinct from Glass’s opera as a text in the abstract. Costanzo sings the title role in a register few operatic roles ask for at this length, alongside J’Nai Bridges as Nefertiti, Zachary James in the largely spoken role of Amenhotep III (the opera famously drops sung Egyptian, Akkadian and Hebrew text alongside spoken narration in the audience’s own language), and Dísella Lárusdóttir as Queen Tye. McDermott’s rehearsal process reportedly drew on the actor and director Michael Chekhov’s movement vocabulary, a set of physical qualities including “molding,” “flying,” “floating” and “radiating”, to help the cast find a way of moving through Glass’s slow-shifting musical time that felt purposeful rather than merely static, a concern specific to staging Glass’s music, where conventional operatic gesture and pacing don’t map easily onto such long, repeated structures.

About the label and recording

Orange Mountain Music is Philip Glass’s own dedicated record label, founded in 2001 specifically to keep the composer’s large and often hard-to-find catalogue in print and to document new productions of his stage works as they happen, this release is one of a substantial run of Glass premieres and revivals the label has issued over more than two decades. The Grammy itself was awarded jointly to conductor Karen Kamensek, the four credited soloists, producer David Frost, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, reflecting how much of the opera’s effect depends on ensemble precision in music built from long, gradually shifting repeated patterns rather than conventional operatic set-pieces.

A note on this page

This review is freshly written to cover a real, current recording rather than recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 archive, which closed before this specific staging existed. It’s part of the site’s new coverage of what’s actually being recorded and awarded in classical and opera today, written from independently verified facts about the production, its cast and its Grammy win, not a fabricated critical opinion.