On the final day of the festival, Romaeuropa anticipates the celebrations for Philip Glass’s 90th birthday, which will take place in January 2027, with Philip Glass Afternoon Sessions, an entire afternoon dedicated to one of the composers who has most radically reshaped the sonic landscape of our time.
At the center of this tribute, Third Coast Percussion (a Chicago-based quartet and Grammy Award-winning ensemble, the first percussion group in history to receive the award in the classical category) presents Aguas da Amazonia, one of Glass’s most hypnotic and visionary scores, reinterpreted through an expanded, fluid, and immersive timbral universe.
Born from the long artistic dialogue between the American composer and the ensemble, and newly reactivated in a 2025 version created for Twyla Tharp Dance, the work moves through Glass’s writing like a liquid geography of pulses, reverberations, and layers, where minimalism becomes living, organic, almost ritual matter.
After celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025, Third Coast Percussion continues to establish itself as one of the most inventive ensembles on the international scene, pushing percussion beyond its traditional boundaries and transforming each concert into a physically engaging, surprising, and radically contemporary listening experience. An immersion into Glass’s universe that is at once tribute, reactivation, and promise.
Third Coast Percussion is the Chicago-based, GRAMMY Award-winning percussion quartet that marked a decisive turning point in contemporary classical music, becoming the first percussion ensemble to win the award in its category. Founded in 2005 by Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore, the group has established itself as one of the most inventive and versatile ensembles on the international scene, capable of redefining the concert as a space for research, listening, and direct connection with the audience. Over the course of twenty years of activity, they have forged a unique path, traversing repertoires, formats, and collaborations with a rare freedom that spans contemporary music, performance, dance, and interdisciplinary creation. Alongside interpreting seminal composers such as Steve Reich, John Cage, and Philip Glass, the quartet has developed an intensive commissioning and creative output, working with artists like Zakir Hussain, Jessie Montgomery, Jlin, Danny Elfman, Clarice Assad, and Tigran Hamasyan, and contributing decisively to the expansion of the 21st-century percussion repertoire. With over thirty recordings, tours across four continents, and a constant presence in major international musical venues, Third Coast Percussion stands out for a practice that combines precision, energy, curiosity, and a vision of percussion as an open, fluid, and deeply contemporary language.
