Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble, led by music director Michael Riesman, gave a marathon performance of the composer's seminal piece Music in Twelve Parts at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall Monday night. It was the West Coast premiere of the complete work, which had received its world premiere 35 years ago at New York's Town Hall.

"I loved it," exclaims San Jose Mercury News music critic Richard Scheinin. "Most of all I loved the visual richness of the music, its way of stretching one's imagination through its sea of sound. This is a cinematic piece, conjuring, for me, vast landscapes, galloping Arabian steeds, lush foliage, growing ever thicker as Glass piles on more and more musical garlands."

Glass's writing in Music in Twelve Parts leads, at times, says Scheinin, "toward a new euphoric breakthrough." He describes its make-up this way:

There is a Baroque intricacy at work, a micro-level of interlocking gears, as well as a larger, tranced-out story line: the landscape, the percolating groove, the spaciousness of the piece, which feels improvisational, related to pulsing, early '70s jams by, say, Miles Davis or even the Grateful Dead.

Scheinin sees the music in this epic piece as, "if anything, insistently and intricately propulsive ... ultimately hinting at something eternal." Glass's Music in Twelve Parts, the reviewer concludes:

... with its youthful energy and imagination, is such a beguiling paradox. At first, it seems so narrow in sound, limited by its minimalist methods. But then, unfolding like time itself, it comes to contain so much. It opens up, grows vast. Maybe that's what the audience, shouting like a rock crowd, was responding to Monday when it ended: the mysterious scope of the music.

Read the full review at mercurynews.com.

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"For a full-body immersion in the early compositional world of Philip Glass, you can't do much better than Music in Twelve Parts," says San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman. He says the issues the composer addresses in the piece "are endlessly productive and nuanced. And to hear a composer lay out his palette in such richly evocative detail is a rare and rewarding delight." The review can be found at sfgate.com.

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Writer Janos Gereben spoke with Glass for the San Francisco Examiner prior to Monday's event. The composer discusses the origins of the monumental piece, written, he says, behind the wheel of a yellow cab during his years as a New York City cab driver. Gereben also spoke with singer Lisa Bielawa, a Bay Area native, about her central, Herculean role in the near-four-hour performance. Read the interviews at sfexaminer.com.

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The Nonesuch recording of the complete Music in Twelve Parts is available on the three-disc set here. Parts of the piece are also included in the new, ten-disc retrospective of the composer's Nonesuch recordings, the Glass Box.