This latest installment in Bridge’s ongoing Crumb edition includes an especially important performance of the tone poem A Haunted Landscape. Recorded only once previously, by Arthur Weisberg and the New York Philharmonic, that version suffered from the need to use reduced forces for reasons of economy. So this marvelous reading featuring excellent playing and impressively atmospheric sound could (and should) be regarded as virtually a world-premiere recording. The title more or less explains it all, but it hardly suggests the richness of texture and fantastic sound world that Crumb conjures up, alternating passages of mysterious night sounds with pounding rhythms and a heavenly chorale in the strings. Crumb wrote only a small handful of orchestral pieces, but each is a gem.
Celestial Mechanics, for amplified piano (four hands) belongs to Crumb’s Makrokosmos series (which includes his magnificent Music for a Summer Evening for two pianos and percussion). Its four movements comprise what the composer described as a “cosmic dance suite”, and while it might not exactly set your toes tapping, Robert Shannon and Haewon Song deliver a wonderfully buoyant, rhythmic performance with an impressively sustained rendition of the lengthy final movement. Shannon gets a solo turn in Processional, one of Crumb’s more approachable pieces and also one that demonstrates that his highly colored music does not need to rely on “special effects” to make an impact. Shannon’s performance has great coherence and intensity, even at low dynamic levels, and when listening to the final pages it will surprise you that 11 minutes have passed.
Finally, two performances of Easter Dawning, a four-minute occasional piece composed for carillon, frame the rest of the music like bookends. How Crumb overcomes the limitations of this intractable medium defies analysis, but like everything he writes the piece inhabits a sound world all its own, and like all of the other works on this disc it’s extremely well played and recorded. When complete, Bridge’s edition will run to about 11 discs (more than might be expected given Crumb’s reputation as a slow worker), and surely will constitute a landmark in American music on disc. Get this, and come join the party.
