Glass seen through

Even by Philip Glass's standards, his latest opera, Galileo Galilei, by the Goodman Theatre of Chicago, is a poor work. The music is as always. Chord sequences so simplistic and repetitive that even I can reproduce them at home.

A constant pulsing as lazy substitute for rhythm. Doggedly syllabic wordsetting, to tunes which, despite Glass's protestations that he is "trying to write melodies which are truly beautiful and fresh and unexpected", are the very opposite of those things. Instrumentation - 10 players taken from the City of London Sinfonia, competently conducted by Beatrice Affron - that ignores instrumental character. The fashionability of such anti-music is a real triumph of image over substance.

In the past, innovative directors such as Robert Wilson have managed to fill the void of Glass's opera scores with their own theatrical imaginations.

Not here. Mary Zimmerman's production is like the self-conscious indulgences of a high-school drama student. She is also the librettist.

Her unconvincing text, sometimes formal, sometimes painfully casual (as in Galileo's little career chat with Pope-to-be Cardinal Barberini), presents scenes from Galileo's life in reverse order. So we first see the hero as a blind old man, and take leave of him as a young boy watching an opera supposedly composed by his father, Vincenzo. Any opera by Galilei, by the way, would have been a matter of very dry recitative sparsely accompanied, not the horrid pastiche of a Tyrolean waltz that Glass has written. (Earlier, a passage for three noblewomen sounded as if intended as a caricature of the Rhinemaidens, or maybe of the Beverley Sisters. (Is Glass trying to be funny, or what?)

There's more of equal mediocrity: the stiff choreography of the scene depicting Galileo's experiments with acceleration, the naff snowfall when Galileo reads a letter from his cloistered daughter. And the singing is generally rather weak. Daniel Ostling's set design, a pair of renaissance arcades garnished with a series of rather beautiful backdrops is, at least, something to delight in.

Galileo is showing at the Barbican until 9 November. Box office: 020 7638 8891.