Philip Glass is an amazing person, our contemporary, he once worked as a taxi driver in Manhattan. So far he is the only modern classical composer who I really like a lot (although modern classical music in general is to me really revolting, better Brittany Spears than this cacophonic muddle). He reminds me of Bach... although he calls himself "maker of repetitive patterns", and if you listen to the video below you'll see why.
One of my most listened to recordings is pianist Paul Barnes playing his transcriptions of the Orphee opera. Recently I managed to get sheet music for these transcriptions:
and there is one very short and simple but hauntingly beautiful piece which I learned literally in one evening:
While you are listening to this, two words about its history: Glass wrote his Orpee opera based on an old French movie, where there's an episode where Orphee (Jean Marais, in the movie he is a bohemian artist in Paris) sleeps with Euridice in his bedroom, and the Princess of Death appears and simply watches them for a while... this is what this piece aims to describe.
this picture shows a snapshot from the movie, and the corresponding scene from the opera.
There are more pieces there that I'm determined to learn eventually, but they are much harder so it'll take some time.