Symphony No. 5,

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Minimalism's master entrepreneur is up to his Fifth Symphony, a multicultural choral fresco on spiritual texts, newly recorded by Dennis Russell Davies and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Like all Glass's other pieces, it consists of the chug-chug repetition of slowly shifting harmonies, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Alas, what sounded fresh (or at least different) 20 years ago is now as agonizingly familiar as a Hemingway parody. Same old same old same old same old...

--By Terry Teachout