At 80, America’s most famous composer remains a maverick. The man who’s conducted his 11 symphonies talks about why.

Philip Glass, the most famous and among the most-performed of living composers, turned 80 in January, and the year is being feted with “Glass@80” celebrations all over the world. And yet, Glass remains a maverick; much of his music remains little-known, and many serious music lovers are convinced they don’t like it. And few of those birthday celebrations are at the major cultural institutions in the country of his birth. The Kennedy Center? The National Symphony Orchestra? The Boston Symphony Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic? Look again.

“There’s a lot of people that think they don’t like that,” says the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, “without knowing what ‘that’ is.”

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Two pianists show the difference between playing and performing

On Sunday afternoon, I heard a live performance of a piece I’d just reviewed a few months before: Igor Stravinsky’s four-hand piano version of his seminal “The Rite of Spring,” which caused a veritable riot at its world premiere as a ballet in Paris in 1913. It’s famous for its skewed, off-kilter rhythms and raw drive, and the piano version is made no easier by the fact that the two players have to jockey for room at the keyboard. On Sunday at the Phillips Collection, Dennis Russell Davies, the well-known conductor and pianist, took off his jacket before performing it with his wife, the pianist Maki Namekawa, and observed to the audience that people might want to watch them fighting over who gets to use the pedal.

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