4LP with the best / memorable selections from Naqoyqatsi, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, In the Upper Room, Songs from Liquid Days, The Photographer, Glassworks, Itaipu and more. Collaborations with Suzanne Vega, Linda Ronstadt, David Byrne, the Kronos Quartet and Yo-Yo Ma. Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble and his many collaborations with artists from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented influence on the musical and intellectual life of his time. The operas - "Einstein on the Beach", "Satyagraha" and "Akhnaten" among many others - are performed in leading houses worldwide and rarely to empty seats. Glass has written music for experimental theater and Oscar-winning feature films. Glass is the first composer to have simultaneously won a wide, cross-generational audience in opera, the concert hall, dance, film and pop music. Much of his early work was based on the repeated rendition of short, elegant melodic fragments that moved back and forth in an auditory tapestry. Or to put it another way, it placed the listener in a kind of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds and evolves. Over the past 30 years, Glass has composed more than twenty-five operas, large and small; twelve symphonies; three piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet with orchestra; soundtracks for films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris' documentary about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for piano and organ. "Essential" is available as a limited edition of 1500 numbered copies on Crystal Clear Vinyl. The 4LP is housed in a deluxe 10mm slipcase cover and includes a 4-page booklet