It’s not only one of the most riveting film scores of the last 30 years, it’s a great work – and album – in its own right.

'I love Glass's music,' writes Michael Cunningham in the note included with this recording, 'almost as much as I love [Virginia] Woolf's MrsDalloway, and for some of the same reasons. Glass, like Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes and ends; he insists, as did Woolf, that beauty often resides more squarely in the present than it does in the present's relationship to past or future.' Seldom has there been such a concisely eloquent description of Glass's work. And the analogy with Woolf is in this case quintessentially correct, for The Hours is a film with deals with Mrs Woolf, her creation Mrs Dalloway and, as we eventually learn, a Los Angeles housewife, Mrs Brown. The present-ness of their situations is what connects these three women, eternally containing the potential to leap into the future or regress into the past… Was there ever a more perfect film for Glass's current lyrical manner? He himself refers to his own past, quoting from his 'Glassworks' and 'Solo piano' collections, and from as far back as his opera Satyagraha, but the way in which the material is treated here, clothed in nostalgic colours by piano, string quartet and orchestra, transforms it inevitably into that eternal present. This album of music has a fragile beauty that never lapses into mere sentimentality.