Customer Rating:  
Summary: recycled glass
Comment: This is yet another release by Glass that is an utter loss. Ever since Philip Glass got popular, his music has become banal and redundant. He keeps recycling the same sounds from other recordings, and does not do anything different from the past ten years. This recording just leaves the listener longing for the older Glass recordings that were what originally stood out from other stuff. Glass should just retire if all he can do is rehash and recycle previous material.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Longing" is a let down
Comment: This album is a disappointment on several levels. Being a fan of Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass my expectations may have been unreasonably high but this album strikes me as the worst of both Cohen and Glass. In my mind the weakness of Cohen is that his lyrics and poetry sometimes are just plain silly or pretentious while Glass tends to be formulaic and repetitious. On "Book of Longing" both of their weakness's are revealed very strongly.
Two other points that I did not like.
1. The singers sound disassociated with the music and lyrics. Sometimes I got the impression that this was a satirical record making fun of Cohen's songs rather than a serious reinterpretation of it.
2. The sound is mismatched to Cohen's song. Many of these songs are from "Ten New Songs" and I liked the way they sounded originally. However here they sound silly and unemotional.
I had hoped that "Longing" would be a musical interpretation by Philip Glass of Cohen's songs. I don't know how that would have sounded but I can't help but feel that anything would have sounded better than this effort.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Speechless is right!
Comment: I, too, am speechless. But not with awe. Being a long time Leonard Cohen fan and familiar with the poetry in his Book of Longing, I know Mr. Cohen is not Mr. Sunshine but these dirges have none of the intelligence (possibly even wisdom) his work contains. Everything about this album is terrible--even to the singing. I can't believe Leonard Cohen approved this work. AWFUL!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Captivating and Astounding Work
Comment: I was expecting a lot of "glassagies", which are a re-use of the beautiful, yet sometimes too often repeated Glass passages (as in Dracula), but instead, I found unique, beautiful passages that while they could be recognized as a Philip Glass work, are new and pleasant. This work is captivating, and encapsulates the Glass Fan within a flowing, poetic work, which was captured with excellent recording clarity.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice if you like other Glass song albums
Comment: I saw Book of Longing live when Philip Glass was in the Netherlands for the Philip Glass festival, so I have special memories. Although this is played by a small ensemble and there is a lot of focus on the singers (duh), I really like the arrangements. I can listen to this over and over, although the album is perhaps a bit more monotonous than Philip's other song collections. Overall, a solid recommendation for Glass fans. If this is your first Glass song CD, I recommend Songs From Liquid Days over this one, which is more easily accessible.
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