That's Another Brilliant Idea, Steinberg

I don't know how long it's been available, but Sony Classical sells a reissue of the original CBS recording of Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach. On Amazon it goes for about $30 -- A lot more equitable than the price for the previous edition, which like most early CD reissues just mapped the contents of the original LPs onto an equal number of shortish CDs and then marked them all up per the industry-standard price fixing rate.

It would have done me a lot more good early in college, but since I had to spend a bit of crunch time in my mostly unoccupied office on Saturday morning it was good to cue up the album on my iPod and just let it run for close to three hours. For all that the Philip Glass Ensemble has gotten closer to the composer's intended sound over the decades, I prefer its recordings from the '70s and early '80s, with their astringent synthesizer sounds and boppier, less precise woodwind playing. It helps that Glass' compositions then still did what his music's best at doing. Einstein's sense of spectacle sounds dated to me but its structural tightness and almost paradoxical sense of spaciousness are a thrill when you're in the mood for it.