1987
[DDD], [DAD], [AAD]

{CD}

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These are fine performances by the University of Pennsylvania Chamber Players of a somewhat tedious collection of works by the American experimental composer George Crumb. The Vox Balaenae is a suite based on songs of the humpback whale: the musicians are instructed in the score to perform in a "serene, pure, transfigured" manner. OK. The Madrigals continues the composer's lifelong exploration of the expressive potentials in extended instrumental techniques. "Dark and disquieting" they may be, as the liner notes intone; but they're also for listeners with a fair amount of patience.

Joshua Cody [at Amazon.com]

Since George Crumb's soundscapes are imagined with such precision and sensitivity they are usually grateful for the performer and so too for the listener. Since they are predominantly soft and slow, however and since all the musical meaning is on or close to the surface, they can easily be boring unless the performance has an element of charisma.
   Jan DeGaetani has that charisma, certainly far more so than Anne-Marie Muhle on the rival recording of the Madrigals (BIS). Listening to her vibrant and dramatic singing, it is possible to believe that these settings of Lorca's death-haunted poetry add up to one of the most impressive song-cycles of our time and that Crumb's distinctive brand of musical onomatopoeia is more than just attractive musical wallpaper.
   Vox balaenae ("The Voice of the Whale") is better known in Britain, thanks largely to performances by Douglas Young's ensemble Dreamtiger (who also recorded the piece on Cameo Classics -— LP only). Here Crumb's sound-effects are at their most haunting, and the ingenious evocations of exotic percussion using only flute cello, piano and a couple of kitchen accessories, can only be admired. The new recording is admirable in many ways, but I nevertheless found myself assembling a catalogue of niggling criticisms -— the flautist's singing-and-playing imperfectly balanced, a piano-string-glissando not done with the fingernail as requested, quartertones too wide, and so on which probably would not have registered at all had the inner intensity been stronger.
   An Idyll for the Misbegotten purports to represent the condition of "the species homo sapiens at the present moment in time". The ten-minute piece for flute and percussion is accordingly doom-and-gloomy and the atmospheric performance it receives here is barely enough to sustain one's interest.
   Madrigals was recorded in 1969 and sounds rather studio-bound (a drawback Jan DeGaetani triumphantly overcomes). The other works are beautifully recorded, although with insufficient silence allowed between them.