Crumb: Metamorphoses, Books I & II
Marcantonio Barone, piano.
Bridge Records 9551
Total Time: 75:59
Recording: ****/****
Performance: ****/****
There are two “great” American composers whose last names start with the letter “C” who could not be more polar opposites sonically. The more popular of the two, Aaron Copland, found most of his music entering the common repertoire and, apart from his later works, tended to generally be in accessible musical language (though one could argue his early modernist works stretch that generalization). The other is the noted avant-garde experimental composer George Crumb (1929-) who is admired and noted for his stretching of musical notation and sound. The latter often also results in creating new sonorities and timbres within traditional instrumentation and vocalization. His most famous work that exemplifies most of these techniques is Ancient Voices of Children (1970). Crumbs keyboard explorations for “amplified piano” appeared as well in the early 1970s in a series of pieces collectively called Makrokosmos (a sort of Bartokian nod that in Crumb’s explorations further transformed perceptions of sound and musical materials).
In some respects, his more recent sets of Metamorphoses for piano are both a bit of reflection as well as an expansion upon those earlier piano works. There are two “books” of ten brief pieces each that make up this significant new contribution to the piano literature. They were composed between 2015-17 and 2018-20, respectively. They are inspired by visual art (by artists Klee, Van Gogh, Chagall, Whistler, Jasper Johns, Gauguin, Dali, Kandinsky, Wyeth, Dinnerstein, Klimt, Picasso, and O’Keefe) and it is the names of these paintings that serve as the titles for each of the works. In this way, they create a contemporary journey to parallel that of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In these works, Crumb finds interesting ways to interpret these images in musical sound. Sometimes it will include unusual effects of playing on the strings of the piano; other times other objects are used to create effects, vocalizations, or spoken text. The latter is most telling in “Crows Over the Wheatfield” where Crumb creates the effect of cawing birds. Equally fascinating is Crumb’s inclusion of more traditional folk music which brings a more tonal palette to his music. This comes to the forefront in The Fiddler. Throughout these individual movements, Crumb also explores blues, some quotation, and more intriguingly a host of harmonic approaches that provide a further aural foothold to tonal music and practice. The music thus becomes a sort of composer’s mind that has found a way out into the world as the paintings work their vivid imagery into the imagination. The pieces move well from intense drama to reflective and lighter moments in music that feels a lot more accessible than one might suspect.
Pianist Marcantonio Barone is a critically-acclaimed performer of contemporary music and interpreter of Crumb’s music. He is the perfect choice for bringing to disc these world premiere recordings of Crumb’s most recent body of piano music. It might be well to locate the actual paintings referenced in these pieces to gain a more connected feel to the music that accompanies them, though it might be best to first absorb them on their own terms. The sound is well-captured in this release which requires careful miking to pickup some of the inner piano technique. It is equalized well though that these feel less gimmicky and really a part of the fabric of the music.
These two books of Metamorphoses are still too recent to tell how they will be perceived in the overall oeuvre of Crumb’s music. They feel like a catalogue of his compositional style as well as a sort of homage to and collage of the techniques pioneered in the 20th Century. Bridge’s release is a must and one wonders if anyone might take up the challenge of an orchestral version of some of these pieces down the road.
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