It’s over 20 years since Philip Glass’s reworking of Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et La Bête premiered in New York in 1994, and 70 years since the film itself first screened. However, the performance – which Glass himself has described as “essentially a theatrical music event, not a cinematic event” – still has a spellbinding power.

La Belle et La Bête was the second in Glass’s Cocteau trilogy, which began with Orphée, where he used the film’s scenario as the basis for the libretto of a chamber opera, and finished with a dance/theatre work based on Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles. For La Belle et La Bête, Glass removed Georges Auric’s music and the dialogue from Cocteau’s film and set all the original words in a through-composed operatic score, to be performed live by singers and a small orchestra, with the famous black and white film screening behind. Originally, Glass added a chamber orchestra to his own six-member ensemble of keyboards and winds, while six singers played the nine characters. In the touring version seen here, there are six musicians and four singers, conducted by Michael Riesman, who has been a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1974...