The lack of programme notes was significant. The music of Philip Glass successfully bypasses the brain: it’s tough even trying to let it through a millimetre of the grey matter for the purposes of analysis and description. It can seem improvisatory; but in fact it’s so deeply marinaded and self-digested that, in performance, it works directly on the nerves and senses. That, no doubt, is why the Barbican Hall was sold out.

The great man was there himself. And his whispered, mumbled verbal introductions did little to clarify what was going on, except to introduce his fellow performers, the admirable cellist Wendy Sutter, and Mick Rossi, percussion. So the ears did their work unaided — and loved nearly every minute of it.

The 16-minute centrepiece of the evening was a suite of four so-called Tissues — interludes, really — from Glass’s score for Godfrey Reggio’s 2002 film, Naqoyqatsi, a visual montage about globalised technology and violence. They were arranged for the evening’s soloists. A tiny figure would glint from a celeste, be joined by the cello, and then mutate into more forms than could ever be thought imaginable. Or an elegiac cello song, born of an archetypal Glass arpeggio, would be turned to a mirage in the harmonic palette of the marimba and, ballasted by piano, become a type of variations on a ground bass.

The longest work was Sutter’s 28-minute cello solo called, simply, Songs and Poems. This was a miraculous and moving set of Bach-inspired solo suites for our day: sequences, shooting out from their recurring bass note, would branch and flower; rhythmic curlicues would resonate and inflect in ways reminiscent of an Indian raga; simple descending minor scales would move the spirit like mournful Yiddish song. We also heard a potent arrangement of Glass’s music for the Jean Genet film The Screens, about the Algerian war.

The shortest pieces were Glass’s own piano solos: two eclectic Etudes and a fun duet with Rossi, based on The Chase from Orphée.

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