Last night, I heard a performance of the recently-debuted collaboration between Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing. The piece provides a musical setting for some twenty poems. The poems are by Cohen, the famous Canadian singer-songwriter (who, for example, wrote the song “Hallelujah” that shows up in the first Shrek movie at the point when all of the main characters are separated and depressed) and sometime Buddhist monk. Glass, composer of various operas, symphonies, film scores (The Thin Red Line, Notes on a Scandal, The Hours, Kundun, The Illusionist, Candyman, etc.), and less traditional musical forms, supplies the orchestral and vocal score.

The result is perhaps a lesson in the power of expectations. I came to the experience expecting something odd. Glass’s music and Cohen’s words have both always been heady, cerebral, and emotionally complex. Yet Glass has a marked preference for precision and mathematical rigor in his composition, while Cohen’s writing favors the messy rhythms of lived experience. I expected a tension between these sources, with the success or failure of the music to really depend on how that tension was managed.

I was not at all disappointed. The collision of Cohen’s earthiness and Glass’s ties to the world of art music creates moments of wonderful irony, as classical vocalists solemnly intone profanities, sexual innuendo, and the occasional goofy joke about monastic life. Yet, to my delight, these tensions came off as both comical and intentional. Glass’s score occasionally underlines such moments with percussive exclamation marks and other such sonic winks and nods. Another tension, between the natural-language rhythms of much of Cohen’s poetry and the high precision of Glass’s compositions, also worked well for me. This potential contradiction pushed Glass, I think, to find ways of making his musical formulae more flexible and expressive.

After the single listen I had last night, I can’t remember the details of every part of this piece. Some poem settings were not especially memorable, but I found others unforgettable. Three segments of the piece were clear stand outs to me. The first is the near-rock composition that Glass created for a Cohen poem about a puppet version of the Holocaust, which was melodic, propulsive, and simultaneously tragic and comic. The second was the wonderful, sprightly composition for a charmingly melancholy poem about death and reincarnation, featuring the idea that your dead dog has become an ant that you should not pat — because your clumsy affection will kill it. Finally, my favorite segment of the piece is a poem about a sexual encounter between the narrator and a married woman, in which the narrator both describes the woman’s seductive qualities and explains to the listening deity the reasons he made the mistake of sleeping with her. The poem is outstanding, reminiscent of Cohen’s best songs. And the music just sells every emotion in it; it’s tender and sensual when it should be, lyrical and sad at the right times, and achieves an amazing mysticism when necessary.

So, I had a good time with this seemingly unlikely collaboration. But my experience certainly seems not to have been universally shared. I overheard a few impromptu reviews on the way to the car. “It was really… Different. I like older classical music better.” “My girlfriend got the tickets. Halfway through, I turned to her and said, what did you bring me to?” “Well, they can’t all be good.” I obviously can’t argue against these people’s aesthetic judgments. But it’s interesting that all three of them imply that the speakers expected something quite different from what they got. I don’t know if they would have liked the concert better had they done their homework on Glass and Cohen, but it at least seems like a plausible idea to me.