George Crumb Celebrates 90 with a World Premiere

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 tonight) by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

The mood in Alice Tully Hall was celebratory: Wu Han, the Society’s energetic co-artistic 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 before and after the concert. If anyone had a problem with its three-hour length, it was not overheard on the way out.

For the entire concert, the stage was filled with percussion instruments, smoothly rearranged between pieces by an able stage crew, with the piano as centerpiece. Gilbert Kalish and Gloria Chien spent much of their time on their feet, swiping and plucking its strings. There were no other orchestral instruments or chairs on stage.

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 easy-flowing Barber-like songs all the more amazing. She performed well known folksongs of the 40-minute American Songbook III with the same charm and perfect intonation, regardless of the startling crusty dissonances from amplified piano, and percussion setup; wind machine, xylophone, soprano recorder, and Tibetan prayer stone were the instruments behind her. The composer’s rather slow meditation has a certain flavor of Ives--both Charles and Burl. It would have been too long, had not the tunes--“I gave my love a cherry”-- been so familiar.

The brief Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) of 1964, for violin and piano, were gently put across by Kristin Lee with Chien. Its movements are identified by Italian tempo markings, but it is Crumb, a young American on a composer journey, fiddling with tones and sonorities.

                                                        George Crumb with Sunday's performers

Kalish premiered 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. Repeated chordal sonorities were sharpened by whatever had been done to the strings.  Describing Crumb’s six short alternative sequences, the program note by Paul Griffiths 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 arresting, inviting Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) for Three Masked Players, will surely be among the composer’s most remembered works; known for 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 pianist Chien.

The concert’s 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 with the Library of Congress.  The first of its four movements, “Easter Dawning,” is based on Crumb’s piece for carillon, or pealing church bells. Other movement titles are “A Ghostly Barcarolle” (whose percussive sounds are augmented by whistling, and water being poured from a pitcher into a bucket),  “Drummers of the Apocalypse” (gutsy taiko drumming and shouts), and “Appalachian Echoes” (“Shall We Gather,” “I wonder as I wander,”), which again nods to Ives.

_{Photo by Tristan Cook}