George Crumb’s Spanish Trances

Music of Albéniz, Crumb, and Schubert
Bowdoin International Music Festival
Crooker Theater, Brunswick High School, Brunswick, ME
July 31, 2009

It’s been nearly a half-century since he first indulged it in “Night Music I,” but composer George Crumb’s “obsessive interest,” as he puts it, in the poetry of Federico García Lorca has yet to be sated. Friday night brought the premiere of Crumb’s eleventh Lorca-based piece, “Sun and Shadow (Spanish Songbook II).” And he’s still trying new things: it’s the first of his Lorca cycles to be set in English translation, and also the first scored for the traditional singer-piano duo.

Not that the treatment of either instrument is exactly traditional, though it’s certainly traditional for Crumb: the soprano is tasked with a palette of song, speech, whispers, and sound effects, the pianist spends a good portion of the time on assignment inside the instrument, strumming, plucking, stopping the strings. The construction, too, is Crumb’s typical mobile-like juxtaposition of exotic sounds. But compared with many of his chamber settings, these mobiles were more compact, whirling in tighter orbits. “Lazy River” rotates between pentatonic, vaguely jazzy melodic fragments, intimate humming, and the distant rumble of the piano’s lowest strings. “The Fly” cycles through onomatopoetic piano trills and vocal buzzing, Sprechstimme, coloratura sparks, and an apposite Bartók quotation (his piano piece “The Diary of a Fly,” naturally). “The Dance of the Moon in Santiago” treats the cycles near-strophically, the sequence of a percussive strike on the piano frame, timbale-like staccato clusters, a warbling melody shifting into heightened narration, and a punctuating, echoing shout from the pianist marking off the verses. The two quietest songs showed off Crumb’s talent for lapidary, spooky mood: “The Interrupted Concert” makes sharp use of another quotation, Saint-Saëns’ “Havanaise,” translated among a piano duet between keyed and plucked notes, while the singer drops in some sly castanets; “Farewell” juxtaposes an austere vocal torchiness with a clockwork piano nocturne, a finale of shrewd, lingering restraint.

Crumb’s combination of sonic specificity and overt, intense theatricality can be tricky to navigate, but this performance was marvelous. Pianist Peter Basquin effortlessly multitasked techniques, but more importantly, kept each song’s temporal thread taut and clear. The composer’s daughter, Ann Crumb, was the singer, and her deep Broadway pedigree proved ideal for subsuming the music’s shifting colors into a dramatic whole—shifts between song and speech were smoothly natural, glissandi and grace notes were integrated into a convincing, invented vocal vernacular. It was a persuasive rendition of a persuasive piece. Crumb was there, basking in the applause, and looking pretty sprightly for a near-80-year-old. He and centenarian Elliott Carter could do an advertisement for the youth-promoting properties of modern music.

The concert opened with guitarist Ricardo Iznaola performing Isaac Albéniz’s “Four Spanish Vignettes,” guitar-inspired piano works later transcribed back into solo guitar music, the transit resulting in music that seems like it should be more instrumentally idiomatic than it really is. The best was Andrés Segovia’s arrangement of “Mallorca,” a fluent enough translation that Iznaola could lay out some soulful cantabile. After intermission, violinist Dennis Kim, cellist Amir Eldan, and pianist Edward Auer—nattily coordinated in black shirts and white jackets—gave a similarly sleek and stylish rendition of Franz Schubert’s E-Flat Major Piano Trio (D. 929). With the dry acoustic—good for a high school auditorium, but still a high school auditorium—somewhat favoring the piano, background figures came into sharp-focus prominence; as such, the rolling arpeggios and chromatic cascades in the opening movement, the slow movement’s marching chords, and the scherzo’s repeated notes created an entertaining silent-movie vibe. The finale especially—chases of roller-coaster scales, magic-lantern storms of tremolos—provided a quotient of sparkling, operetta-like peril and triumph.