CRUMB @ 90 RETROSPECTIVE: CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY by Leslie Kandell Musical America
Bridge Records has pledged to record everything George Crumb ever composed. As Crumb’s 90th birthday year was honored on Sunday with a world premiere, in his presence, it’s apparent that Bridge will be busy for a long time. A substantial, well-ordered new percussion piece, “Kronos-Kryptos,” concluded the first of two all-Crumb concerts (the second is Tuesday) by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Kalish had introduced the 1983 Processional for piano in 2015, and played it again Sunday. It is a ten-minute exploration of quietly percussive stasis, and unusual in the work of someone who doesn’t write for solo piano. Describing Crumb’s six short alternative sequences, the program note by Paul Griffeths offered a core Crumb option: “Pianists can choose to include these echoes of the familiarly unfamiliar or keep the piece in its pristine strangeness.”
The mood in Alice Tully Hall was celebratory: Wu Han, the Society’s energetic co-director, introduced the concert by waving at the composer’s box and yelling, unmiked, “Happy 90th birthday!” Old friends and acolytes from in and out of New York City greeted each other and engaged in serious conversations, few taking time to buy drinks. If anyone had a problem with the concert’s surprise three-hour length, it was not overheard on the way out.
The stage had no orchestra or chairs, but was filled with percussion instrument setups smoothly tweaked between pieces by an able stage crew, the centerpiece being the piano. (Highly experienced pianists Gilbert Kalish and Gloria Chien spent much time on their feet, swiping and plucking its strings.)
The program began with “Three Early Songs” from the composer’s student days and worked its way through the decades, ending with the premiere. Tony Arnold’s soprano has not aged, making her sweet command of these easily-flowing Barberlike songs all the more amazing. She performed wellknown folksongs of the 40-minute American Songbook III with the same charm and perfect intonation, regardless of the startling crusty dissonances of its amplified piano and percussion setups for four--wind machine, soprano recorder, xylophone, Tibetan prayer stone among them--behind her. This rather slow meditation has a certain flavor of Ives--both Charles and Burl. It would have been too long, had not the tunes been so familiar.
The arresting, inviting “Vox Balaenae,” (Voice of the Whale) for Three Masked Players, will surely be named in the composer’s obituary, the way “Alice’s Restaurant” will be in Arlo Guthrie’s. Relatively famous and inspired by sounds of the humpback whale, it was first publicly performed in 1972 by flutist Paula Robison, cellist David Finckel and pianist Samuel Sanders, after the composer had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for “Echoes of Time and the River.” On Sunday its poetic atmosphere was persuasively evoked by longtime Crumb flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, cellist Mihai Marica and Chien.
The unassuming lead percussionist was Daniel Druckman. Ambulating calmly among setups with quiet assurance, he caused astonishing sounds to be generated.
There is no recording of “Kronos-Kryptos” because Bridge hasn’t gotten around to this brand new Society co-commission yet. The first of its four movements is based on Crumb’s piece for carillon, or pealing church bells. “Easter Dawning,” it’s called. Of course. Other movement titles are “A Ghostly Barcarolle” (including whistling, and water being poured from a pitcher into a bucket), “Drummers of the Apocalypse” (taiko volume, shouts), and “Appalachian Echoes” (“Shall We Gather,” “I wonder as I wander,”). Ives rampant. Both.
It also shows Crumb knowing just what he likes. OK. He got there.
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