Tag: Bridge Records

Thursday night datebook

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Events: very soon, soon, and not so soon:

-Bowerbird presents Eliane Radigue’s complete Naldjorlak cycle at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 North American Street in Philadelphia, 8 pm, Friday, September 24.

-Orchestra 2001 offers two works by Osvaldo Golijov, plus Enoch Arden by Richard Strauss, with Marina Sirtis as narrator; September 24 at Trinity Center, September 26 at Swarthmore College.

- Oboe goddess Peggy Pearson plays the Boston premiere of Stephen Jaffe’s Chamber Concerto “Singing Figures” at the first Winsor Music concert of the season. Sunday, October 3 at St. Paul’s Church, Brookline, 7:00 PM. (Check out the fine recording of the piece on Bridge.)

UPDATE: I just received an e-mail reporting that the October 3 Winsor Music  concert is cancelled, due to “an injury to a performer. She will be OK, but could not manage this week’s schedule of rehearsals. We regret any inconvenience caused by this cancellation.”

- Mimi Stillman’s Dolce Suono Ensemble premieres a new Richard Danielpour trio on October 22 at Trinity Center in Philadelphia. Read here (scroll down) about the group’s Mahler/Schoenberg project, coming next spring, and including commissioned works by Steven Stucky, Steven Mackey, Fang Man, David Ludwig, and Stratis Minakakis.

-21st Century Consort offers Barber, Copland, Jon Deak, Jordan Kuspa, and Mark Kuss at its season opener, October 23, Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC.

Crumb’s American Songbooks

jamesprimosch5 Comments

George Crumb is a quintessentially American composer - to my mind, ranking with Ives and Copland. Wildly popular in the 1970’s, Crumb’s stock fell a bit in the 1980’s, though I think his popularity overseas did not wane as much as here in the states. Crumb has experienced a late-in-life creative blossoming, in some ways comparable to that of Elliott Carter, two decades older than Crumb. Carter was extraordinarily productive in his 90s, and during the same period, Crumb was similarly productive in his 70s, finding in American folksong a rich compositional resource. The result has been a series of American Songbooks, now grown to six substantial sets. In these, Crumb has arranged folksongs, spirituals, and other traditional tunes, either for solo voice, or two singers, accompanied by percussion quartet and piano. The medium is perfect for Crumb, with his exquisite ear for instrumental color and preference for long ringing sounds. Each set uses an extraordinarily large complement of instruments, including various non-western ones. (The works would surely be more widely known if the instrumental resources required were not so great.) The piano, as the composer has remarked, serves as a bass for the percussion ensemble which it would otherwise lack.

The pieces have been written with Philadelphia’s Orchestra 2001 in mind (see a relevant video clip at their website), and the group’s performances, led by its artistic director James Freeman, are exemplary. The first four of the Songbooks have been recorded for Bridge Records, with Barbara Ann Martin, and the composer’s own daughter Ann Crumb as the superb soloists. (Find Songbooks II and IV on disc here; Books I and III here.) The Bridge releases are part of a their “Complete Crumb Edition”, an admirable commitment to documenting the work of a true American treasure.