Classical Music

The great American composer, George Crumb's most recent compositions have been two large piano compositions, "Metamorphoses, Books 1 and 2", completed in 2019. Volume 19 of Bridge's Complete Crumb Edition, a series of recordings supervised by the composer himself, is made up entirely of Metamorphoses Book 1, performed by Crumb specialist, Marcantonio Barone. The work consists of ten movements, each based on a famous painting by artists including Paul Klee, Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall, James Whistler, Jasper Johns, Paul Gauguin, Salvador Dali, and Vasily Kandinsky. At 90, George Crumb continues to produce works of incredible detail and passion. Critic David Hurwitz wrote that "Bridge’s decision to embark on a complete edition of George Crumb’s music remains one of the most significant recording projects currently in progress, as well as one of the most artistically successful."

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REVIEWS:

Klee, Van Gogh, Chagall, Whistler, Gauguin and Kandinsky all give inspiration for a stylistically inclusive, vigorously inventive sequence: just 37½ minutes of music, but a disc of real substance.

– Sunday Times (UK)

The pianist Marcantonio Barone places Crumb’s evocative gestures with reverent care and gives them space to make their full effect, and he’s as responsive to the music’s savage or folk-like moments as he is to its quiet poetry. The recorded sound is ideally close so the piano’s resonances sound huge and all-enveloping, as they should. Those who already know Crumb’s music well might be a tad disappointed that this piece breaks no new ground creatively. But for those who don’t it offers a wonderfully concentrated, vivid introduction to his imaginative world.

– The Telegraph (UK)

This selection is also available on DVD(Video).

Classical Music

For over 60 years, George Crumb's music has been recognised as a sonoristic phenomenon that cannot be compared to the output of other artists composing at the same time. Although the catalogue of artistic influences under which Crumb was over the years is extremely extensive (starting from introducing quotes from the works by Johann Sebastian Bach, ending with a sporadic use of harmonic and rhythmic means identical with the style of Claude Debussy and B�la Bart�k), these inspirations - even in the earliest phase of his activity - would usually turn out to be only a contribution to the creation of original music forms and crystallisation of a sonoristic sound landscape typical of the composer. This album includes three completely stylistically different compositions by George Crumb, depicting different stages of the composer's sonoristic quest.

Classical Music

Classical Music

"Echos de la Terre," the first album with Cypres by the highly promising Trio O3, is intended as an aural journey into the immensity and immeasurability of the world around us. Each composition resonates with one of the fundamental elements present in nature. However, the element earth, mentioned in the title of the CD, is not directly linked to any of the four pieces. Rather, it is light (Fiorini) that appears as a crucial element alongside air (Kõrvits), fire (Saariaho), and water (Crumb).

Interpreting these complex works as if they were their mother tongue, Lydie Thonnard, Eugénie Defraigne, and Lena Kollmeier, thanks to their mastery of unconventional playing techniques, bring them to life and fuse their distinct instrumental voices into a harmonious whole, lavishing the listener with unexpected pleasures and profound emotions.

Bridge Records announces the release of Volume 21 the Complete Crumb Edition, a monumental recording project begun in 1982, and completed 42 years later with this final installment. The Grammy award-winning Crumb series documents the late American composer's complete catalog of works, spanning Crumb's seventy-five year compositional career. Project producer David Starobin writes that “the series benefited tremendously from George's participation in the recording and post-production of these documents.” This last volume includes compositions from the beginning, middle, and end of Crumb’s career and features the world premiere recording of the composer's penultimate composition, the percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos (2020), performed by Ensemble 20/21 of the Curtis Institute of Music. The record also includes Crumb's second acknowledged composition, the Sonata for Solo Violoncello (1955), performed by cellist Timothy Eddy, as well as two performances of Crumb's piano solo, Processional (1983), played by pianists Gilbert Kalish (keyboard version) and Marcantonio Barone (alternate version with extended piano effects).

From the ensemble: The sad news of George Crumb’s death was announced on 6 February 2022, shortly after these recordings from a concert in Holland in 1978 were discovered in the KRO-NCRV archives in Hilversum. They included the first European performance of Dream Sequence (1976), one of his most beautiful and original compositions. George was always a pleasure to work with, highly professional, considerate, open to suggestions and relaxed. On one fraught occasion, when Rohan’s cello mysteriously disappeared for several hours, making rehearsal impossible, we would have expected many composers to throw a tantrum (!) but not George. He remained completely calm and slightly amused by the ensuing Tati-esque comédie. He was also a master calligrapher. His scores, all hand-drawn, are works of art, the notation often original, and models of musical practicality. We offer these three recordings from long ago in tribute and gratitude to a remarkable musician, composer and friend.

Includes work(s) by George Crumb. Ensemble: Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Thomas Conlin.

Voices From The Morning Of The Earth: A Cycle of American Songs from North and South, East and West (2008) is the sixth of seven American Songbooks that occupied George Crumb for most of the millennium’s opening decade. This recording (Volume 17 of Bridge's Crumb Edition) completes Bridge's cycle of Crumb's American Songbooks. The seven songbooks are approximately five hours in length, and constitute George Crumb's magnum opus. Also on this CD is Crumb's Idyll for the Misbegotten. The composer writes that “flute and drum are to me those instruments which most powerfully evoke the voice of nature. I have suggested that ideally (even if impractically) my Idyll should be “heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” The Sleeper with words by Edgar Allan Poe, transforms Poe's lugubrious meditation on a dead beloved (“Soft may the worms about her creep!”) into a haunting ode to a woman slumbering beneath the “mystic moon.”

This selection is Volume 3 of Bridge's Complete Crumb Edition.
This selection received a Grammy Award for "Best Classical Contemporary Composition."

This historic release couples George Crumb’s earliest work for piano, the Five Pieces for Piano (1962) with his most recent piano cycle, Metamorphoses (2017). Margaret Leng Tan has long been a champion of Crumb’s music, and he composed Metamorphoses (Book 1) for her. This recording is of the German premiere at the legendary Donaueschingen Festival in 2017. Crumb’s Metamorphoses is a natural descendent of his monumental Makrokosmos I & II piano cycle of the early 1970s. With a nod to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, each movement of the Metamorphoses is inspired by a famous painting. And, like the Makrokosmos, it requires the pianist to be a virtuoso not only at the keyboard but playing inside the piano and vocalizing as well. Ms. Tan is regarded at the “Diva of the Toy Piano,” and Crumb has also incorporated the toy piano and toy percussion instruments into some movements. Crumb says: “I have always been most fortunate to have had outstanding pianists who were willing to tackle the formidable technical and musical innovations in my scores. And among the very finest of these is Margaret Leng Tan for whom I wrote Metamorphoses (Book l). Margaret’s technical prowess and superb artistic sensitivity is a combination that must warm the heart of any composer!” The album also includes the early Five Pieces for Piano. All the components of Crumb’s mature compositional language are already evident: a broad palette of coloristic effects along with an extraordinarily sensitive command of nuance, his unmistakable musical gestures, an inherent sense of drama coupled with a magical suspenseful atmosphere and a battery of interior piano effects demanding that the pianist be somewhat of a harpist and percussionist as well.

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REVIEW:

This CD start out with George Crumb’s most recent piano cycle, the Metamorphoses, but closes with his earliest, the 5 Pieces for Piano from 1962.

Though Nocturne may be the most impressionistic piece in the set, the music depicting Dali’s Persistence of Memory is the most abstract, the most like the George Crumb most listeners know from such works as Ancient Voices of Children.

The 5 Pieces for Piano already show Crumb as an individualist, even at this early stage making the pianist play the insides of the instrument. It is, however, much more abstract than the Metapmorphoses, which you would expect in a work less tied to visuals. Although a difficult piece, both in terms of the technique it demands of the player and the listening aspect, it is worth your effort to absorb and understand it.

This is clearly an outstanding album, particularly for the Metamorphoses.

– Art Music Lounge

Bridge already recorded Unto the Hills, actually the third part of Crumb's epic American Songbook tetralogy, but later decided to rearrange a couple of the songs and add one more number: Down in the Valley/Hush, Little Baby, the latter spoken by the composer himself. Alongside the first cycle in the series, The River of Life, this two-disc set (offered at a special price) comprises works composed expressly for the composer's daughter, singer and actress Ann Crumb. She has a beautiful, non-operatic yet very well-trained voice that's just perfect for this music. Her experience as a jazz singer stands her in particularly good stead in Amazing Grace, the third number in The River of Life, where she ornaments her father's relatively plain vocal line extensively, but wholly idiomatically.

Scored like its predecessor for a splendidly sonorous ensemble of amplified piano and four percussionists, The River of Life focuses on hymns, spirituals, and revival tunes. These include favorites like Shall We Gather at the River?, Nearer, My God to Thee, and Deep River, as well as some that are less familiar. Crumb sets them with his trademark combination of warmth, fantasy, and an aural imagination unique in the annals of music, ancient or contemporary. One More River to Cross, subtitled "A Humoresque", already suggests the rich vein of humor that runs through this collection, but it hardly prepares you for the hilarious ending of Give Me That Old Time Religion, where the singer has to imitate the skipping of a 78rpm record needle (a feat that Ann Crumb manages with effortless glee).

The performances, by singer and ensemble alike, are as close to perfect as makes no difference, and so are the sonics. Even if you already bought Unto the Hills, get this anyway. Crumb is a national treasure, and one of the very few contemporary composers whose new works are worth waiting for. These song cycles are masterpieces, plain and simple, and you must hear them.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com