A Memorial Album for George Crumb

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Naxos of America)

Following up on yesterday’s article about a recording of the music of Milton Babbitt, I would like to devote today to an album released almost exactly a month ago of the music of George Crumb. The album was conceived and created in response to word of Crumb’s death this past February 6. The performance is by a quartet that calls itself Ensemble Dreamtiger, whose “mascot” is proudly displayed on the front cover (as can be seen above). The musicians are Kathryn Lukas on flute, Alexander Balanescu on violin, Douglas Young on piano, and James Wood on percussion. The cover also cites cellist Rohan de Saram, who is presumably a “guest artist.”

In spite of any “guest” status, de Saram dominates the center of this album with a performance of the three-movement sonata for solo cello that Crumb composed in 1955. It is preceded by the 1976 “Dream Sequence,” the second of three works that Crumb collected under the general title Images. This was scored for violin, cello, piano, percussion and “off-stage glass harmonica.” I am pretty sure that my wife-to-be and I provided the “glass harmonica,” stroking wine glasses in the lobby of the venue in which this piece was performed for a chamber music series in Connecticut. The cello sonata is followed by “Vox Balaenae” (voice of the whale), scored for flute, cello, and piano and completed in 1971.

Like Babbitt, Crumb is a bit of a thorn in my side, but for entirely different reasons. He was on the faculty of the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania at the same time that I was an Assistant Professor there teaching computer science. Ironically, our respective buildings shared a parking lot, making it particularly easy for me to make use of the Music Library! During my half-dozen years at Penn, I never encountered Crumb; and I was far from the only member of the university faculty to make that claim. He had a few students that were passionately devoted to his wisdom and guidance, and he pretty much had nothing to do with anyone else. His music was similarly isolated. The only piece of his that I heard in recital at Penn was his first Makrokosmos volume, composed for amplified piano.

As a result, I only began to become aware of Crumb’s music after I had put a generous distance between us. My encounter with “Dream Sequence” in Connecticut was a good example. Where my writing was concerned, during my tenure with Examiner.com, I had the good fortune to listen to a performance by Victoria Neve of that same Makrokosmos volume at San Francisco State University. I found her performance about as convincing as one might expect, even though I felt that there were flaws in the composition itself that could not be overlooked.

More recently, I have had only a few encounters with performances of Crumb’s works. Left Coast Chamber Ensemble musicians Loren Mach (percussion) and Michael Goldberg (guitar) performed Mundus Canis (a dog’s world) in January of 2019. My other major encounter was with the Chordless duo of pianist Allegra Chapman and soprano Sara LeMesh, who performed four of George Crumb’s settings of poems by Walt Whitman in his Apparition collection for an Old First Concerts recital in January of 2020. Neither of these was a particularly memorable occasion, in spite of my enjoying the efforts of the performers.

On the other hand, whenever I have the opportunity to download a recording of a Crumb composition, I usually let my curiosity get the better of me. I can usually come up with a few descriptive passages that are adequate, at the very least. However, I never seem to have the motivation to return to any of those albums for follow-up listening. My guess is that this new release will suffer a similar fate.