George Crumb: Complete Crumb Edition, Volume 11

Still with us at age 91, George Crumb is one of the most fascinating of modern composers, creating a wide range of music for ensembles of many sizes and pieces that go from the immensely powerful and dramatic to the mysterious and subtle.  This blogger's first exposure to his music came with the Kronos Quartet's 1990 album Black Angels and Crumb's title piece was staggering to hear for a complete novice to classical, much less the so-called "avant-garde," music.

In acquiring a number of albums of the composer's works over the years, among the most enjoyable are several of the Complete Crumb Edition series by the great Bridge Records.  Today's featured volume is the eleventh which spans time and type in a very enjoyable and enlightening way.  The first third, roughly, of the album consists of an early work "Variazoni" for orchestra and it definitely provides plenty of variation with elements of the ensemble, as well as the whole orchestra, and a range of powerful intense movements to quieter, contemplative ones with plenty of space left to enhance the sense of mystery or foreboding.

Nearly a half-century later is "Otherworldly Resonances" for a pair of amplified pianos and which is considered the second part of "Zeitgeist," featured in the fourth volume of the series (which this blogger also has).  The first movement's "Double Helix" utilizes an ostinato and ornamentation that suggests the DNA structure, while the following "Celebration and Ritual" explores a range of sounds that include ebullient and dynamic exchanges and what the composer called "mysterious and brooding" elements.  "Palimpsest" features a trio of layered sections moving from "shadowy, ghostly" sounds to  "pale and distant" element and finally what is denoted to be a layer that "projects most clearly and vividly."

The remaining roughly half-hour highlights a major collaborator of Crumb's, the incredible mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, who is showcased with her remarkable range of styles with such pieces as "Night of the Four Moons," written after the 1969 moon landing and which includes unusual instrumentation like banjo, electric cello and percussion along with woodwinds, while DeGaetani sings from poems by Crumb's favorite poet, Federico García Lorca (tragically murdered by Franco's Fascist police in Spain in the 1930s).  Also included are 1984's "The Sleeper" based on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe and "Three Early Songs," written by a teenage Crumb for his future wife and utilizing poems from obscure poets Robert Southey (early 19th century) and Sara Teasdale (early 20th century.)  There is a tremendous range of musical and vocalized elements here and provide an excellent bookend to the orchestra work that began this fine retrospective of nearly six decades of a great composer.