Centaur Records

1990 [AAD]

{CD}

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[Recorded at O'Laughlin Auditorium, St. Mary's College, Notre Dame, IN on January 20-21, 1988]

In the 1970s George Crumb's music offered an attractive fusion of old and new, of spirituality and technology, and he found if not a mass audience then at least a surprisingly broadly-based one. Since then he has exerted a similar fascination on composers and listeners in Poland and Russia. Prolonged exposure to his work has undoubtedly revealed its limitations, and it seems a long time since anything as exciting as Ancient Voices of Children (1970) or The Voice of the Whale (1971) has appeared. Nevertheless, the music is too resourceful and too engaging to deserve oblivion and Jeffrey Jacob's projected survey of all the solo piano works is most welcome.
   Crumb's sonic inventiveness has always been at its sharpest when pitted against the apparent black and white of the piano. And his piano compositions reveal the make-up of his style with particular clarity -— it is predominantly derived from Bartok, with special effects in the tradition of Henry Cowell and quotations courtesy of the late-1960s soft-core-progressive ethos. But the Five Pieces for piano, completed in 1962, reveal different roots, in the world of Webern -— admittedly a rather spaced-out (in both senses) Webern, but the language intersects with Boulez's "Third Sonata" in ways I would not have anticipated. Makrokosmos I (1972) is classic Crumb though, with a much more immediately appealing harmonic language and the full range of patent sound effects (some of them now sounding embarrassingly kitsch -— in particular the grunting and groaning of "The Phantom Gondolier"). Another ten-year jump brings us to the Gnomic Variations and something like a synthesis —- renewed concentration of thought plus an abundance of inside-the-piano work.
   There is always a difficult balance to strike in recording Crumb's music. It has to be quite closely miked if all the effects are to register properly; on the other hand, the feeling of ambient space is crucial. The Centaur engineers have erred on the side of dryness and the amount of hiss is a considerable distraction. But Jeffrey Jacob has prepared meticulously and plays with conviction as well as precision. I would only quibble with the tone of some of his string harmonics —- with careful finger-placement these can be made to speak more resonantly.